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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 8101 ***
+
+
+
+
+BERTRAM COPE'S YEAR
+
+Henry Blake Fuller
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+_1. Cope at a College Tea
+
+2. Cope Makes a Sunday Afternoon Call
+
+3. Cope Is "Entertained"
+
+4. Cope Is Considered
+
+5. Cope Is Considered Further
+
+6. Cope Dines--and Tells About It
+
+7. Cope Under Scrutiny
+
+8. Cope Undertakes an Excursion
+
+9. Cope on the Edge of Things
+
+10. Cope at His House Party
+
+11. Cope Enlivens the Country
+
+12. Cope Amidst Cross-Purposes
+
+13. Cope Dines Again--and Stays After
+
+14. Cope Makes an Evasion
+
+15. Cope Entertains Several Ladies
+
+16. Cope Goes A-Sailing
+
+17. Cope Among Cross-Currents
+
+18. Cope at the Call of Duty
+
+19. Cope Finds Himself Committed
+
+20. Cope Has a Distressful Christmas
+
+21. Cope, Safeguarded, Calls Again
+
+22. Cope Shall Be Rescued
+
+23. Cope Regains His Freedom
+
+24. Cope in Danger Anew
+
+25. Cope in Double Danger
+
+26. Cope as a Go-Between
+
+27. Cope Escapes a Snare
+
+28. Cope Absent From a Wedding
+
+29. Cope Again in the Country
+
+30. Cope as a Hero
+
+31. Cope Gets New Light on His Chum
+
+32. Cope Takes His Degree
+
+33. Cope in a Final View_
+
+AFTERWORD
+
+
+
+
+1
+
+_COPE AT A COLLEGE TEA_
+
+
+What is a man's best age? Peter Ibbetson, entering dreamland with
+complete freedom to choose, chose twenty-eight, and kept there. But
+twenty-eight, for our present purpose, has a drawback: a man of that
+age, if endowed with ordinary gifts and responsive to ordinary
+opportunities, is undeniably--a man; whereas what we require here is
+something just a little short of that. Wanted, in fact, a young male
+who shall seem fully adult to those who are younger still, and who may
+even appear the accomplished flower of virility to an idealizing maid
+or so, yet who shall elicit from the middle-aged the kindly indulgence
+due a boy. Perhaps you will say that even a man of twenty-eight may
+seem only a boy to a man of seventy. However, no septuagenarian is to
+figure in these pages. Our elders will be but in the middle forties and
+the earlier fifties; and we must find for them an age which may evoke
+their friendly interest, and yet be likely to call forth, besides that,
+their sympathy and their longing admiration, and later their tolerance,
+their patience, and even their forgiveness.
+
+I think, then, that Bertram Cope, when he began to intrigue the little
+group which dwelt among the quadruple avenues of elms that led to the
+campus in Churchton, was but about twenty-four,--certainly not a day
+more than twenty-five. If twenty-eight is the ideal age, the best is
+all the better for being just a little ahead.
+
+Of course Cope was not an undergraduate--a species upon which many of
+the Churchtonians languidly refused to bestow their regard. "They come,
+and they go," said these prosperous and comfortable burghers; "and,
+after all, they're more or less alike, and more or less unrewarding."
+Besides, the Bigger Town, with all its rich resources and all its
+varied opportunities, lay but an hour away. Churchton lived much of its
+real life beyond its own limits, and the student who came to be
+entertained socially within them was the exception indeed.
+
+No, Bertram Cope was not an undergraduate. He was an instructor; and he
+was working along, in a leisurely way, to a degree. He expected to be
+an M.A., or even a Ph.D. Possibly a Litt.D. might be within the gift of
+later years. But, anyhow, nothing was finer than "writing"--except
+lecturing about it.
+
+"Why haven't we known you before?" Medora T. Phillips asked him at a
+small reception. Mrs. Phillips spoke out loudly and boldly, and held
+his hand as long as she liked. No, not as long as she liked, but longer
+than most women would have felt at liberty to do. And besides speaking
+loudly and boldly, she looked loudly and boldly; and she employed a
+determined smile which seemed to say, "I'm old enough to do as I
+please." Her brusque informality was expected to carry itself off--and
+much else besides. "Of course I simply _can't_ be half so intrepid as I
+seem!" it said. "Everybody about us understands that, and I must ask
+your recognition too for an ascertained fact."
+
+"Known me?" returned Cope, promptly enough. "Why, you haven't known me
+because I haven't been here to _be_ known." He spoke in a ringing,
+resonant voice, returning her unabashed pressure with a hearty good
+will and blazing down upon her through his clear blue eyes with a high
+degree of self-possession, even of insouciance. And he explained, with
+a liberal exhibition of perfect teeth, that for the two years following
+his graduation he had been teaching literature at a small college in
+Wisconsin and that he had lately come back to Alma Mater for another
+bout: "I'm after that degree," he concluded.
+
+"Haven't been here?" she returned. "But you _have_ been here; you must
+have been here for years--for four, anyhow. So why haven't we...?" she
+began again.
+
+"Here as an undergraduate, yes," he acknowledged. "Unregarded dust.
+Dirt beneath your feet. In rainy weather, mud."
+
+"Mud!" echoed Medora Phillips loudly, with an increased pressure on his
+long, narrow hand. "Why, Babylon was built of mud--of mud bricks,
+anyway. And the Hanging Gardens...!" She still clung, looking up his
+slopes terrace by terrace.
+
+Cope kept his self-possession and smiled brilliantly.
+
+"Gracious!" he said, no less resonant than before. "Am I a landscape
+garden? Am I a stage-setting? Am I a----?"
+
+Medora Phillips finally dropped his hand. "You're a wicked,
+unappreciative boy," she declared. "I don't know whether to ask you to
+my house or not. But you may make yourself useful in _this_ house, at
+least. Run along over to that corner and see if you can't get me a cup
+of tea."
+
+Cope bowed and smiled and stepped toward the tea-table. His head once
+turned, the smile took on a wry twist. He was no squire of dames, no
+frequenter of afternoon receptions. Why the deuce had he come to this
+one? Why had he yielded so readily to the urgings of the professor of
+mathematics?--himself urged in turn, perhaps, by a wife for whose
+little affair one extra man at the opening of the fall season counted,
+and counted hugely. Why must he now expose himself to the boundless
+aplomb and momentum of this woman of forty-odd who was finding
+amusement in treating him as a "college boy"? "Boy" indeed she had
+actually called him: well, perhaps his present position made all this
+possible. He was not yet out in the world on his own. In the background
+of "down state" was a father with a purse in his pocket and a hand to
+open the purse. Though the purse was small and the hand reluctant, he
+must partly depend on both for another year. If he were only in
+business--if he were only a broker or even a salesman--he should not
+find himself treated with such blunt informality and condescension as a
+youth. If, within the University itself, he were but a real member of
+the faculty, with an assured position and an assured salary, he should
+not have to lie open to the unceremonious hectorings of the socially
+confident, the "placed."
+
+He regained his smile on the way across the room, and the young
+creature behind the samovar, who had had a moment's fear that she must
+deal with Severity, found that a beaming Affability--though personally
+unticketed in her memory--was, after all, her happier allotment. In her
+reaction she took it all as a personal compliment. She could not know,
+of course, that it was but a piece of calculated expressiveness, fitted
+to a 'particular social function and doubly overdone as the wearer's
+own reaction from the sprouting indignation of the moment before. She
+hoped that her hair, under his sweeping advance, was blowing across her
+forehead as lightly and carelessly as it ought to, and that his taste
+in marquise rings might be substantially the same as hers. She faced
+the Quite Unknown, and asked it sweetly, "One lump or two?"
+
+"The dickens! How do _I_ know?" he thought. "An extra one on the
+saucer, please," he said aloud, with his natural resonance but slightly
+hushed. And his blue eyes, clear and rather cold and hard, blazed down,
+in turn, on her.
+
+"Why, what a nice, friendly fellow!" exclaimed Mrs. Phillips, on
+receiving her refreshment. "Both kinds of sandwiches," she continued,
+peering round her cup. "Were there three?" she asked with sudden
+shrewdness.
+
+"There were macaroons," he replied; "and there was some sort of
+layer-cake. It was too sticky. These are more sensible."
+
+"Never mind sense. If there is cake, I want it. Tell Amy to put it on a
+plate."
+
+"Amy?"
+
+"Yes, Amy. _My_ Amy."
+
+"Your Amy?"
+
+"Off with you,--parrot! And bring a fork too."
+
+Cope lapsed back into his frown and recrossed the room. The girl behind
+the samovar felt that her hair was unbecoming, after all, and that her
+ring, borrowed for the occasion, was in bad taste. Cope turned back
+with his plate of cake and his fork. Well, he had been promoted from a
+"boy" to a "fellow"; but must he continue a kind of methodical dog-trot
+through a sublimated butler's pantry?
+
+"That's right," declared Mrs. Phillips, on his return, as she looked
+lingeringly at his shapely thumb above the edge of the plate. "Come, we
+will sit down together on this sofa, and you shall tell me all about
+yourself." She looked admiringly at his blue serge knees as he settled
+down into place. They were slightly bony, perhaps; "but then," as she
+told herself, "he is still quite young. Who would want him anything but
+slender?--even spare, if need be."
+
+As they sat there together,--she plying him with questions and he,
+restored to good humor, replying or parrying with an unembarrassed
+exuberance,--a man who stood just within the curtained doorway and
+flicked a small graying moustache with the point of his forefinger took
+in the scene with a studious regard. Every small educational community
+has its scholar _manqué_--its haunter of academic shades or its
+intermittent dabbler in their charms; and Basil Randolph held that role
+in Churchton. No alumnus himself, he viewed, year after year, the
+passing procession of undergraduates who possessed in their young
+present so much that he had left behind or had never had at all, and
+who were walking, potentially, toward a promising future in which he
+could take no share. Most of these had been commonplace young fellows
+enough--noisy, philistine, glaringly cursory and inconsiderate toward
+their elders; but a few of them--one now and then, at long
+intervals--he would have enjoyed knowing, and knowing intimately. On
+these infrequent occasions would come a union of frankness, comeliness
+and _élan_, and the rudiments of good manners. But no one in all the
+long-drawn procession had stopped to look at him a second time. And now
+he was turning gray; he was tragically threatened with what might in
+time become a paunch. His kind heart, his forthreaching nature, went
+for naught; and the young men let him walk under the elms and the
+scrub-oaks neglected. If they had any interest beyond their egos, their
+fraternities, and (conceivably) their studies, that interest dribbled
+away on the quadrangle that housed the girl students. "If they only
+realized how much a friendly hand, extended to them from middle life,
+might do for their futures...!" he would sometimes sigh. But the
+youthful egoists, ignoring him still, faced their respective futures,
+however uncertain, with much more confidence than he, backed by
+whatever assurances and accumulations he enjoyed, could face his own.
+
+"To be young!" he said. "To be young!"
+
+Do you figure Basil Randolph, alongside his portière, as but the
+observer, the _raisonneur_, in this narrative? If so, you err.
+What!--you may ask,--a rival, a competitor? That more nearly.
+
+It was Medora Phillips herself who, within a moment or two, inducted
+him into this role.
+
+A gap had come in her chat with Cope. He had told her all he had been
+asked to tell--or all he meant to tell: at any rate he had been given
+abundant opportunity to expatiate upon a young man's darling
+subject--himself. Either she now had enough fixed points for securing
+the periphery of his circle or else she preferred to leave some portion
+of his area (now ascertained approximately) within a poetic penumbra.
+Or perhaps she wished some other middle-aged connoisseur to share her
+admiration and confirm her judgment. At all events----
+
+"Oh, Mr. Randolph," she cried, "come here."
+
+Randolph left his doorway and stepped across.
+
+"Now you are going to be rewarded," said the lady, broadly generous.
+"You are going to meet Mr. Cope. You are going to meet Mr.----" She
+paused. "Do you know,"--turning to the young man,--"I haven't your
+first name?"
+
+"Why, is that necessary?"
+
+"You're not ashamed of it? Theodosius? Philander? Hieronymus?"
+
+"Stop!--please. My name is Bertram."
+
+"Never!"
+
+"Bertram. Why not?"
+
+"Because that would be too exactly right. I might have guessed and
+guessed----!"
+
+"Right or wrong, Bertram's my name."
+
+"You hear, Mr. Randolph? You are to meet Mr. Bertram Cope."
+
+Cope, who had risen and had left any embarrassment consequent upon the
+short delay to Basil Randolph himself, shot out a hand and summoned a
+ready smile. Within his cuff was a hint for the construction of his
+fore-arm: it was lean and sinewy, clear-skinned, and with strong power
+for emphasis on the other's rather short, well-fleshed fingers. And as
+he gripped, he beamed; beamed just as warmly, or just as coldly--at all
+events, just as speciously--as he had beamed before: for on a social
+occasion one must slightly heighten good will,--all the more so if one
+be somewhat unaccustomed and even somewhat reluctant.
+
+Mrs. Phillips caught Cope's glance as it fell in all its glacial
+geniality.
+
+"He looks down on us!" she declared.
+
+"How down?" Cope asked.
+
+"Well, you're taller than either of us."
+
+"I don't consider myself tall," he replied. "Five foot nine and a
+half," he proceeded ingenuously, "is hardly tall."
+
+"It is we who are short," said Randolph.
+
+"But really, sir," rejoined Cope kindly, "I shouldn't call you short.
+What is an inch or two?"
+
+"But how about me?" demanded Mrs. Phillips.
+
+"Why, a woman may be anything--except too tall," responded Cope
+candidly.
+
+"But if she wants to be stately?"
+
+"Well, there was Queen Victoria."
+
+"You incorrigible! I hope I'm not so short as that! Sit down, again; we
+must be more on a level. And you, Mr. Randolph, may stand and look down
+on us both. I'm sure you have been doing so, anyway, for the past ten
+minutes!"
+
+"By no means, I assure you," returned Randolph soberly.
+
+Soberly. For the young man had slipped in that "sir." And he had been
+so kindly about Randolph's five foot seven and a bit over. And he had
+shown himself so damnably tender toward a man fairly advanced within
+the shadow of the fifties--a man who, if not an acknowledged outcast
+from the joys of life, would soon be lagging superfluous on their rim.
+
+Randolph stood before them, looking, no doubt, a bit vacant and
+inexpressive. "Please go and get Amy," Mrs. Phillips said to him. "I
+see she's preparing to give way to some one else."
+
+Amy--who was a blonde girl of twenty or more--came back with him
+pleasantly and amiably enough; and her aunt--or whatever she should
+turn out to be--was soon able to lay her tongue again to the syllables
+of the interesting name of Bertram.
+
+Cope, thus finally introduced, repeated the facial expressions which he
+had employed already beside the tea-table. But he added no new one; and
+he found fewer words than the occasion prompted, and even required. He
+continued talking with Mrs. Phillips, and he threw an occasional remark
+toward Randolph; but now that all obstacles were removed from free
+converse with the divinity of the samovar he had less to say to her
+than before. Presently the elder woman, herself no whit offended, began
+to figure the younger one as a bit nonplused.
+
+"Never mind, Amy," she said. "Don't pity him, and don't scorn him. He's
+really quite self-possessed and quite chatty. Or"--suddenly to Cope
+himself--"have you shown us already your whole box of tricks?"
+
+"That must be it," he returned.
+
+"Well, no matter. Mr. Randolph can be nice to a nice girl."
+
+"Oh, come now,----"
+
+"Well, shall I ask you to my house, after this?"
+
+"No. Don't. Forbid it. Banish me."
+
+"Give one more chance," suggested Randolph sedately.
+
+"Why, what's all this about?" said the questioning glance of Amy. If
+there was any offense at all, on anybody's part, it lay in making too
+much of too little.
+
+"Take back my plate, somebody," said Mrs. Phillips.
+
+Randolph put out his hand for it.
+
+"This sandwich," said Amy, reaching for an untouched square of wheat
+bread and pimento. "I've been so busy with other people...."
+
+"I'll take it myself," declared Mrs. Phillips, reaching out in turn.
+"Mr. Randolph, bring her a nibble of something."
+
+"_I_ might----" began Cope.
+
+"You don't deserve the privilege."
+
+"Oh, very well," he returned, lapsing into an easy passivity.
+
+"Never mind, anyway," said Amy, still without cognomen and connections;
+"I can starve with perfect convenience. Or I can find a mouthful
+somewhere, later."
+
+"Let us starve sitting," said Randolph, "Here are chairs."
+
+The hostess herself came bustling up brightly.
+
+"Has everybody...?"
+
+And she bustled away.
+
+"Yes; everybody--almost," said Mrs. Phillips to her associates, behind
+their entertainer's back. "If you're hungry, Amy, it's your own fault.
+Sit down."
+
+And there let us leave them--our little group, our cast of characters:
+"everybody--almost," save one. Or two. Or three.
+
+
+
+
+2
+
+_COPE MAKES A SUNDAY AFTERNOON CALL_
+
+
+Medora Phillips was the widow of a picture-dealer, now three years
+dead. In his younger days he had been something of a painter, and later
+in life as much a collector as a merchandizer. Since his death he had
+been translated gradually from the lower region proper to mere
+traffickers on toward the loftier plane which harbored the more select
+company of art-patrons and art-amateurs. Some of his choicer ventures
+were still held together as a "gallery," with a few of his own canvases
+included; and his surviving partner felt this collection gave her good
+reason for holding up her head among the arts, and the sciences, and
+humane letters too.
+
+Mrs. Phillips occupied a huge, amorphous house some three-quarters of a
+mile to the west of the campus. It was a construction in wood, with
+manifold "features" suggestive of the villa, the bungalow, the chateau,
+the palace; it united all tastes and contravened all conventions. In
+its upper story was the commodious apartment which was known in quiet
+times as the picture-gallery and in livelier times as the ball-room. It
+was the mistress' ambition to have the lively times as numerous as
+possible--to dance with great frequency among the pictures. Six or
+eight couples could gyrate here at once. There was young blood under
+her roof, and there was young blood to summon from outside; and to set
+this blood seething before the eyes of visiting celebrities in the arts
+and letters was her dearest wish. She had more than one spare bedroom,
+of course; and the Eminent and the Queer were always welcome for a
+sojourn of a week or so, whether they came to read papers and deliver
+lectures or not. She was quite as well satisfied when they didn't. If
+they would but sit upon her wide veranda in spring or autumn, or before
+her big open fireplace in winter and "just talk," she would be as
+open-eyed and open-eared as you pleased.
+
+"This is much nicer," she would say. Nicer than what, she did not
+always make clear.
+
+Yes, the house was nearly three-quarters of a mile to the west of the
+campus, but it was twice as far as if it had been north or south.
+Trains and trolleys, intent on serving the interests of the great
+majority, took their own courses and gave her guests no aid. If the
+evening turned cold or blustery or brought a driving rain she would say:
+
+"You can't go out in this. You must stay all night. We have room and to
+spare."
+
+If she wanted anybody to stay very much, she would even add: "I can't
+think of your walking toward the lake with such a gale in your
+face,"--regardless of the fact that the lake wind was the rarest of
+them all and that in nine cases out of ten the rain or snow would be
+not in people's faces but at their backs.
+
+If she didn't want anybody to stay, she simply ordered out the car and
+bundled him off. The delay in the offer of the car sometimes induced a
+young man to remain. Tasteful pajamas and the promise of a suitably
+early breakfast assured him that he had made no mistake.
+
+Cope's first call was made, not on a tempestuous evening in the winter
+time, but on a quiet Sunday afternoon toward the end of September. The
+day was sunny and the streets were full of strollers moving along
+decorously beneath the elms, maples and catalpas.
+
+"Drop in some Sunday about five," Medora Phillips had said to him, "and
+have tea. The girls will be glad to meet you."
+
+"The girls"? Who were they, and how many? He supposed he could account
+for one of them, at least; but the others?
+
+"You find me alone, after all," was her greeting. "The girls are out
+walking--with each other, or their beaux, or whatever. Come in here."
+
+She led him into a spacious room cluttered with lambrequins, stringy
+portieres, grilles, scroll-work, bric-a-brac....
+
+"The fine weather has been too much for them," she proceeded. "I was
+relying on them to entertain you."
+
+"Dear me! Am I to be entertained?"
+
+"Of course you are." Her expression and inflection indicated to him
+that he had been caught up in the cogs of a sizable machine, and that
+he was to be put through it. Everybody who came was entertained--or
+helped entertain others. Entertainment, in fact, was the one object of
+the establishment.
+
+"Well, can't you entertain me yourself?"
+
+"Perhaps I can." And it almost seemed as if he had been secured and
+isolated for the express purpose of undergoing a particular course of
+treatment.
+
+"----in the interval," she amended. "They'll be back by sunset. They're
+clever girls and I know you'll enjoy them."
+
+She uttered this belief emphatically--so emphatically, in truth, that
+it came to mean: "I wonder if you will indeed." And there was even an
+overtone: "After all, it's not the least necessary that you should."
+
+"I suppose I have met one of them already."
+
+"You have met Amy. But there are Hortense and Carolyn."
+
+"What can they all be?" He wondered to himself: "daughters, nieces,
+cousins, co-eds, boarders...?"
+
+"Amy plays. Hortense paints. Carolyn is a poet."
+
+"Amy plays? Pardon me for calling her Amy, but you have never given me
+the rest of her name."
+
+"I certainly presented you."
+
+"To 'Amy'."
+
+"Well, that was careless, if true. Her name is Amy Leffingwell; and
+Hortense's name is----"
+
+"Stop, please. Pay it out gradually. My poor head can hold only what it
+can. Names without people to attach them to...."
+
+"The people will be here presently," Medora Phillips said, rather
+shortly. Surely this young man was taking his own tone. It was not
+quite the tone usually taken by college boys on their first call. Her
+position and her imposing surroundings--yes, her kindliness in noticing
+him at all--might surely save her from informalities that almost shaped
+into impertinences. Yet, on the other hand, nothing bored one more than
+a young man who openly showed himself intimidated. What was there
+behind this one? More than she had thought? Well, if so, none the
+worse. Time might tell.
+
+"So Miss Leffingwell plays?" He flared out his blue-white smile. "Let
+me learn my lesson page by page."
+
+"Yes, she plays," returned Medora Phillips briefly. "Guess what," she
+continued presently, half placated.
+
+They were again side by side on a sofa, each with an elbow on its back
+and the elbows near together. Nor was Medora Phillips, though plump, at
+all the graceless, dumpy little body she sometimes taxed herself with
+being.
+
+"What? Oh, piano, I suppose."
+
+"Piano!"
+
+"What's wrong?"
+
+"The piano is common: it's assumed."
+
+"Oh, she performs on something unusual? Xylophone?"
+
+"Be serious."
+
+"Trombone? I've seen wonders done on that in a 'lady orchestra'."
+
+"Don't be grotesque." She drew her dark eyebrows into protest. "What a
+sight!--a delicate young girl playing a trombone!"
+
+"Well, then,--a harp. That's sometimes a pleasant sight."
+
+"A harp needs an express wagon. Though of course it is pretty for the
+arms."
+
+"Arms? Let me see. The violin?"
+
+"Of course. And that's probably the very first thing you thought of.
+Why not have mentioned it?"
+
+"I suppose I've been taught the duty of making conversation."
+
+"The duty? Not the pleasure?"
+
+"That remains to be...." He paused. "So she has arms," he pretended to
+muse. "I confess I hadn't quite noticed."
+
+"She passed you a cup of tea, didn't she?"
+
+"Oh, surely. And a sandwich. And another. And a slice of layer cake,
+with a fork. And another cup of tea. And a macaroon or two----"
+
+"Am I a glutton?"
+
+"Am I? Some of all that provender was for me, as I recall."
+
+They were still side by side on the sofa. Both were cross--kneed, and
+the tip of her russet boot almost grazed that of his Oxford tie. He did
+not notice: he was already arranging the first paragraph of a letter to
+a friend in Winnebago, Wisconsin. "Dear Arthur: I called,--as I said I
+was going to. She is a scrapper. She goes at you hammer and
+tongs--pretending to quarrel as a means of entertaining you..."
+
+Medora Phillips removed her elbow from the back of the sofa, and began
+to prod up her cushions. "How about your work?" she asked. "What are
+you doing?"
+
+He came back. "Oh, I'm boning. Some things still to make up. I'm
+digging in the poetry of Gower--the 'moral Gower'."
+
+"Well, I see no reason why poetry shouldn't be moral. Has he been
+publishing anything lately that I ought to see?"
+
+"Not--lately."
+
+"I presume I can look into some of his older things."
+
+"They are all old--five hundred years and more. He was a pal of
+Chaucer's."
+
+
+She gave him an indignant glance. "So that's it? You're laying traps
+for me? You don't like me! You don't respect me!"
+
+One of the recalcitrant cushions fell to the floor. They bumped heads
+in trying to pick it up.
+
+"Traps!" he said. "Never in the world! Don't think it! Why, Gower is
+just a necessary old bore. Nobody's supposed to know much about
+him--except instructors and their hapless students."
+
+He added one more sentence to his letter to "Arthur": "She pushes you
+pretty hard. A little of it goes a good way..."
+
+"Oh, if _that's_ the case..." she said. "How about your thesis?" she
+went on swiftly. "What are you going to write about?"
+
+"I was thinking of Shakespeare."
+
+"Shakespeare! There you go again! Ridiculing me to my very face!"
+
+"Not at all. There's lots to say about him--or them."
+
+"Oh, you believe in Bacon!"
+
+"Not at all--once more. I should like to take a year and spend it among
+the manor-houses of Warwickshire. But I suppose nobody would stake me
+to that."
+
+
+"I don't know what you have in mind; some wild goose chase, probably. I
+expect your friends would like it better if you spent your time right
+here."
+
+"Probably. I presume I shall end by doing a thesis on the 'color-words'
+in Keats and Shelley. A penniless devil has no luck."
+
+"Anybody has luck who can form the right circle. Stay where you are. A
+circle formed here would do you much more good than a temporary one
+four thousand miles away."
+
+Voices were heard in the front yard. "There they come, now," Mrs.
+Phillips said. She rose, and one more of the wayward cushions went to
+the floor. It lay there unregarded,--a sign that a promising
+tête-à-tête was, for the time being, over.
+
+
+
+
+3
+
+_COPE IS "ENTERTAINED"_
+
+
+Mrs. Phillips stepped to the front door to meet the half dozen young
+people who were cheerily coming up the walk. Cope, looking at the
+fallen cushions with an unseeing eye, remained within the drawing-room
+door to compose a further paragraph for the behoof of his correspondent
+in Wisconsin:
+
+"Several girls helped entertain me. They came on as thick as spatter.
+One played a few things on the violin. Another set up her easel and
+painted a picture for us. A third wrote a poem and read it to us. And a
+few sophomores hung about in the background. It was all rather too
+much. I found myself preferring those hours together in dear old
+Winnebago...."
+
+Only one of the sophomores--if the young men were really of that
+objectionable tribe--came indoors with the young ladies. The
+others--either engaged elsewhere or consciously unworthy--went away
+after a moment or two on the front steps. Perhaps they did not feel
+"encouraged." And in fact Mrs. Phillips looked back toward Cope with
+the effect of communicating the idea that she had enough men for
+to-day. She even conveyed to him the notion that he had made the others
+superfluous. But--
+
+"Hum!" he thought; "if there's to be a lot of 'entertaining,' the more
+there are to be entertained the better it might turn out."
+
+He met Hortense and Carolyn--with due stress laid on their respective
+patronymics--and he made an early acquaintance with Amy's violin.
+
+And further on Mrs. Phillips said:
+
+"Now, Amy, before you really stop, do play that last little thing. The
+dear child," she said to Cope in a lower tone, "composed it herself and
+dedicated it to me."
+
+The last little thing was a kind of "meditation," written very simply
+and performed quite seriously and unaffectedly. And it gave, of course,
+a good chance for the arms.
+
+"There!" said Mrs. Phillips, at its close. "Isn't it too sweet? And it
+inspired Carolyn too. She wrote a poem after hearing it."
+
+"A copy of verses," corrected Carolyn, with a modest catch in her
+breath. She was a quiet, sedate girl, with brown eyes and hair. Her
+eyes were shy, and her hair was plainly dressed.
+
+"Oh, you're so sweet, so old-fashioned!" protested Mrs. Phillips,
+slightly rolling her eyes. "It's a poem,--of course it's a poem. I
+leave it to Mr. Cope, if it isn't!"
+
+"Oh, I beg--" began Cope, in trepidation.
+
+"Well, listen, anyway," said Medora.
+
+The poem consisted of some six or seven brief stanzas. Its title was
+read, formally, by the writer; and, quite as formally, the dedication
+which intervened between title and first stanza,--a dedication to
+"Medora Townsend Phillips."
+
+"Of course," said Cope to himself. And as the reading went on, he ran
+his eyes over the dusky, darkening walls. He knew what he expected to
+find.
+
+Just as he found it the sophomore standing between the big padded chair
+and the book-case spatted his hands three times. The poem was over, the
+patroness duly celebrated. Cope spatted a little too, but kept his eye
+on one of the walls.
+
+"You're looking at my portrait!" declared Mrs. Phillips, as the poetess
+sank deeper into the big chair. "Hortense did it."
+
+"Of course she did," said Cope under his breath. He transferred an
+obligatory glance from the canvas to the expectant artist. But--
+
+"It's getting almost too dark to see it," said his hostess, and
+suddenly pressed a button. This brought into play a row of electric
+bulbs near the top edge of the frame and into full prominence the dark
+plumpness of the subject. He looked back again from the painter (who
+also had black hair and eyes) to her work.
+
+"I am on Parnassus!" Cope declared, in one general sweeping compliment,
+as he looked toward the sofa where Medora Phillips sat with the three
+girls now grouped behind her. But he made it a boreal Parnassus--one
+set in relief by the cold flare and flicker of northern lights.
+
+"Isn't he the dear, comical chap!" exclaimed Mrs. Phillips, with
+unction, glancing upward and backward at the girls. They smiled
+discreetly, as if indulging in a silent evaluation of the sincerity of
+the compliment. Yet one of them--Hortense--formed her black brows into
+a frown, and might have spoken resentfully, save for a look from their
+general patroness.
+
+"Meanwhile, how about a drop of tea?" asked Mrs. Phillips suddenly.
+"Roddy"--to the sophomore--"if you will help clear that table...."
+
+The youth hastened to get into action. Cope went on with his letter to
+"Arthur":
+
+"It was an afternoon in Lesbos--with Sappho and her band of
+appreciative maidens. Phaon, a poor lad of nineteen, swept some
+pamphlets and paper-cutters off the center-table, and we all plunged
+into the ocean of Oolong--the best thing we do on this island...."
+
+He was lingering in a smiling abstractedness on his fancy, when--
+
+"Bertram Cope!" a voice suddenly said, "do you do nothing--nothing?"
+
+He suddenly came to. Perhaps he had really deserved his hostess'
+rebuke. He had not offered to help with the tea-service; he had
+proferred no appropriate remark, of an individual nature, to any of the
+three _ancillae_....
+
+"I mean," proceeded Mrs. Phillips, "can you do nothing whatever to
+entertain?"
+
+Cope gained another stage on the way to self-consciousness and
+self-control. Entertainment was doubtless the basic curse of this
+household.
+
+"I sing," he said, with naïf suddenness and simplicity.
+
+"Then, sing--do. There's the open piano. Can you play your own
+accompaniments?"
+
+"Some of the simpler ones."
+
+"Some of the simpler ones! Do you hear that, girls? He is quite
+prepared to wipe us all out. Shall we let him?"
+
+"That's unfair," Cope protested. "Is it my fault if composers _will_
+write hard accompaniments to easy airs?"
+
+"Will you sing before your tea, or after it?"
+
+"I'm ready to sing this instant,--during it, or before it."
+
+"Very well."
+
+The room was now in dusk, save for the bulbs which made the portrait
+shine forth like a wayside shrine. Roddy, the possible sophomore,
+helped a maid find places for the cups and saucers; and the three
+girls, still formed in a careful group about the sofa, silently waited.
+
+"Of course you realize that this is not such a very large room," said
+Mrs. Phillips.
+
+"Meaning....?"
+
+"Well, your speaking voice _is_ resonant, you know."
+
+"Meaning, then, that I am not to raise the roof nor jar the china. I'll
+try not to."
+
+Nor did he. He sang with care rather than with volume, with discretion
+rather than with abandon. The "simple accompaniments" went off with but
+a slight hitch or two, yet the "resonant voice" was somehow, somewhere
+lost. Possibly Cope gave too great heed to his hostess' caution; but it
+seemed as if a voice essentially promising had slipped through some
+teacher's none too competent hands, or--what was quite as serious--as
+if some temperamental brake were operating to prevent the complete
+expression of the singer's nature. Lassen, Grieg, Rubinstein--all these
+were carried through rather cautiously, perhaps a little mechanically;
+and there was a silence. Hortense broke it.
+
+"Parnassus, yes. And finally comes Apollo." She reached over and
+murmured to Mrs. Phillips: "None too skillful on the lyre, and none too
+strong in the lungs...."
+
+Medora spoke up loudly and promptly.
+
+"Do you know, I think I've heard you sing before."
+
+"Possibly," Cope said, turning his back on the keyboard. "I sang in the
+University choir for a year or two."
+
+"In gown and mortar-board? 'Come, Holy Spirit,' and all that?"
+
+"Yes; I sang solos now and then."
+
+"Of course," she said. "I remember now. But I never saw you before
+without your mortar-board. That changes the forehead. Yes, you're
+yourself," she went on, adding to her previous pleasure the further
+pleasure of recognition. "You've earned your tea," she added.
+"Hortense," she said over her shoulder to the dark girl behind the
+sofa, "will you--? No; I'll pour, myself."
+
+She slid into her place at table and got things to going. There was an
+interval which Cope might have employed in praising the artistic
+aptitudes of this variously gifted household, but he found no
+appropriate word to say,--or at least uttered none. And none of the
+three girls made any further comment on his own performance.
+
+Mrs. Phillips accompanied him, on his way out, as far as the hall. She
+looked up at him questioningly.
+
+"You don't like my poor girls," she said. "You don't find them clever;
+you don't find them interesting."
+
+"On the contrary," he rejoined, "I have spent a delightful hour." Must
+he go on and confess that he had developed no particular dexterity in
+dealing with the younger members of the opposite sex?
+
+"No, you don't care for them one bit," she insisted. She tried to look
+rebuking, reproachful; yet some shade of expression conveyed to him a
+hint that her protest was by no means sincere: if he really didn't, it
+was no loss--it was even a possible gain.
+
+"It's you who don't care for me," he returned. "I'm _vieux jeu_."
+
+"Nonsense," she rejoined. "If you have a slight past, that only makes
+you the more atmospheric. Be sure you come again soon, and put in a
+little more work on the foreground."
+
+Cope, on his way eastward, in the early evening, passed near the
+trolley tracks, the Greek lunch-counter, without a thought; he was
+continuing his letter to "Dear Arthur":
+
+"I think," he wrote, with his mind's finger, "that you might as well
+come down. I miss you--even more than I thought I should. The term is
+young, and you can enter for Spanish, or Psychology, or something.
+There's nothing for you up there. The bishop can spare you. Your father
+will be reasonable. We can easily arrange some suitable quarters..."
+
+And we await a reply from "Dear Arthur"--the fifth and last of our
+little group. But no; there are two or three others--as you have just
+seen.
+
+
+
+
+4
+
+_COPE IS CONSIDERED_
+
+
+A few days after the mathematical tea, Basil Randolph was taking a
+sedate walk among the exotic elms and the indigenous oaks of the
+campus; he was on his way to the office of the University registrar. He
+felt interested in Bertram Cope and meant to consult the authorities.
+That is to say, he intended to consult the written and printed data
+provided by the authorities,--not to make verbal inquiries of any of
+the college officials themselves. He was, after all, sufficiently in
+the academic tradition to prefer the consultation of records as against
+the employment of _viva voce_ methods; and he saw no reason why his new
+interest should be widely communicated to other individuals. There was
+an annual register; there was an album of loose sheets kept up by the
+members of the faculty; and there was a card-catalogue, he remembered,
+in half a dozen little drawers. All this ought to remove any necessity
+of putting questions by word of mouth.
+
+The young clerk behind the broad counter annoyed him by no offer of
+aid, but left him to browse for himself. First, the printed register.
+This was crowded with professors--full, head, associate, assistant;
+there were even two or three professors emeritus. And each department
+had its tale of instructors. But no mention of a Bertram Cope. Of
+course not; this volume, it occurred to him presently, represented the
+state of things during the previous scholastic year.
+
+Next the card-catalogue. But this dealt with the students
+only--undergraduate, graduate, special. No Cope there.
+
+Remained the loose-leaf faculty-index, in which the members of the
+professorial body told something about themselves in a great variety of
+handwriting: among other things, their full names and addresses, and
+their natures in so far as penmanship might reveal it. Ca; Ce; Cof;
+Collard, Th. J., who was an instructor in French and lived on Rosemary
+Place; Copperthwaite, Julian M.; Cotton ... No Cope. He looked again,
+and further. No slightest alphabetical misplacement.
+
+"You are not finding what you want?" asked the clerk at last. The
+search was delaying other inquirers.
+
+"Bertram Cope," said Randolph. "Instructor, I think."
+
+"He has been slow. But his page will be in place by tomorrow. If you
+want his address...."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"--I think I can give it to you." The youth retired behind a screen.
+"There," he said, returning with a bit of pencilling on a scrap of
+paper.
+
+Randolph thanked him, folded up the paper, and put it in his pocket. A
+mere bit of ordinary clerkly writing; no character, no allure. Well,
+the actual chirography of the absentee would be made manifest before
+long. What was it like? Should he himself ever have a specimen of it in
+a letter or a note?
+
+That evening, with his after-dinner cigarette, he strolled casually
+through Granville Avenue, the short street indicated by the address. It
+was a loosely-built neighborhood of frame dwellings, with yards and a
+moderate provision of trees and shrubs--a neighborhood of people who
+owned their houses but did not spend much money on them. Number 48 was
+a good deal like the others. "Decent enough, but commonplace," Randolph
+pronounced. "Yet what could I have been expecting?" he added; and his
+whimsical smile told him not to let himself become absurd.
+
+There were lighted windows in the front and at the side. Which of these
+was Cope's, and what was the boy doing? Was he deep in black-letter, or
+was he selecting a necktie preliminary to some evening diversion
+outside? Or had he put out his light--several windows were dark--and
+already taken the train into town for some concert or theatre?
+
+"Well," said Randolph to himself, with a last puff at his cigarette,
+"they're not likely to move out and leave him up in the air. I hope,"
+he went on, "that he has more than a bedroom merely. But we know on
+what an incredibly small scale some of them live."
+
+He threw away his cigarette and strolled on to his own quarters. These
+were but ten minutes away. In his neighborhood, too, people owned their
+homes and were unlikely to hurry you out on a month's notice. You could
+be sure of being able to stay on; and Randolph, in fact, had stayed on,
+with a suitable family, for three or four years.
+
+He had a good part of one floor: a bedroom, a sitting room, with a
+liberal provision of bookshelves, and a kind of large closet which he
+had made into a "cabinet." There are all sorts of cabinets, but this
+was a cabinet for his "collection." His collection was not without some
+measure of local fame; if not strictly valuable, it was at least
+comprehensive. After all, he collected to please himself. He was a
+collector in Churchton and a stockbroker in the city itself. The
+satirical said that he was the most important collector in "the
+street," and the most important stockbroker in the suburbs. He was a
+member of a somewhat large firm, and not the most active one. His
+interest had been handed down, in a manner, from his father; and the
+less he participated the better his partners liked it. He had no one
+but himself, and a sister on the far side of the city, miles and miles
+away. His principal concern was to please himself, to indulge his
+nature and tastes, and to get, in a quiet way, "a good deal out of
+life." But nobody ever spoke of him as rich. His collection represented
+his own preferences, perseverance and individual predilections. Least
+of all had it been brought together to be "realized on" after his death.
+
+"I may be something of a fool, in my own meek fashion," he
+acknowledged, "but I'm no such fool as that."
+
+He had a few jades and lacquers--among the latter, the ordinary
+inkwells and sword-guards; a few snuff-boxes; some puppets in costume
+from Mexico and Italy; a few begrimed vellum-bound books in foreign
+languages (which he could not always read); and now and then a friend
+who was "breaking up" would give him a bit of Capo di Monte or an
+absurd enigmatic musical instrument from the East Indies. And he had a
+small department of Americana, dating from the days of the Civil War.
+
+"Miscellaneous enough," pronounced Medora Phillips, on once viewing his
+cabinet, "but not altogether"--she proceeded charitably--"utter
+rubbish."
+
+And it was felt by others too that, in the lack of any wide
+opportunity, he had done rather well. Churchton itself was no nest of
+antiquities; in 1840 it had consisted merely of a log tavern on the
+Green Bay road, and the first white child born within its limits had
+died but recently. Nor was the Big Town just across the "Indian
+Boundary" much older. It had "antique shops," true; but one's best
+chances were got through mousing among the small scattered troups of
+foreigners (variegated they were) who had lately been coming in
+pell-mell, bringing their household knick-knacks with them. There was a
+Ghetto, there was a Little Italy, there were bits of Bulgaria, Bohemia,
+Armenia, if one had tired of dubious Louis Quinze and Empire. In an
+atmosphere of general newness a thing did not need to be very old to be
+an antique.
+
+The least old of all things in Randolph's world were the students who
+flooded Churchton. There were two or three thousand of them, and
+hundreds of new ones came with every September. Sometimes he felt
+prompted to "collect" them, as contrasts to his older curios. They were
+fully as interesting, in their way, as brasswork and leatherwork, those
+products of peasant natures and peasant hands. But these youths ran
+past one's eye, ran through one's fingers. They were not static, not
+even stable. They were restless birds of passage who fidgeted through
+their years, and even through the days of which the years were made:
+intent on their own affairs and their own companions; thankless for
+small favors and kind attentions--even unconscious of them; soaking up
+goodwill and friendly offices in a fashion too damnably
+taken-for-granted ... You gave them an evening among your books, with
+discreet things to drink, to smoke, to play at, or you offered them a
+good dinner at some good hotel; and you never saw them after ... They
+said "Yes, sir," or "Yep;" but whether they pained you by being too
+respectful or rasped you by being too rowdyish, it all came to the
+same: they had little use for you; they readily forgot and quickly
+dropped you.
+
+"I wonder whether instructors are a shade better," queried Basil
+Randolph. "Or when do sense and gratitude and savoir-faire begin?"
+
+A few days later he had returned to the loose-leaf faculty. Cope's page
+was now in place, with full particulars in his own hand: his interest
+was "English Literature," it appeared. "H'm! nothing very special in
+that," commented Randolph. But Cope's penmanship attracted him. It was
+open and easy: "He never gave _his_ instructor any trouble in reading
+his themes." Yet the hand was rather boyish. Was it formed or unformed?
+"I am no expert," confessed Randolph. He put Cope's writing on a middle
+ground and let it go at that.
+
+He recalled the lighted windows and wondered near which one of them the
+same hand filled note-books and corrected students' papers.
+
+"Rather a dreary routine, I imagine, for a young fellow of his age.
+Still, he may like it, possibly."
+
+He thought of his own early studies and of his own early
+self-sufficiencies. He felt disposed to find his earlier self in this
+young man--or at least an inclination to look for himself there.
+
+The next afternoon he walked over to Medora Phillips. Medora's upper
+floor gave asylum to a half-brother of her husband's--an invalid who
+seldom saw the outside world and who depended for solace and
+entertainment on neighbors of his own age and interests. Randolph
+expected to contribute, during the week, about so many hours of talk or
+of reading. But he would have a few words with Medora before going up
+to Joe.
+
+Medora, among her grilles and lambrequins, was only too willing to talk
+about young Cope.
+
+"A charming fellow--in a way," she said judicially. "Frank, but a
+little too self-assured and self-centered. Exuberant, but possibly a
+bit cold. Yet--charming."
+
+"Oh," thought Randolph, "one of the cool boys, and one of the
+self-sufficing. Probably a bit of an ascetic at bottom, with good
+capacity for self-control and self-direction. Not at all an
+uninteresting type," he summed it up. "An ebullient Puritan?" he asked
+aloud.
+
+"That's it," she declared, "--according to my sense of it."
+
+"Yet hardly a New Englander, I suppose?"
+
+"Not directly, anyhow. From down state--from Freeford, I think he said.
+I judge that there's quite a family of them."
+
+"Quite a family of them," he repeated inwardly. A drawback indeed. Why
+could an interesting young organism so seldom be detached from its
+milieu and enjoyed in isolation? Prosy parents; tiresome, detrimental
+brothers ... He wondered if she had any idea what they were all like.
+It might be just as well, however, not to know.
+
+"And, judging from the family name, and from their taste at
+christenings, I should say there might be some slant toward England
+itself. A nomenclature not without distinction. 'Bertram'; rather nice,
+eh? And there is a sister who teaches in one of the schools, I
+understand; and her name is Rosalind, or Rosalys. Think of that! I
+gather that the father is in some business," she concluded.
+
+"Well, well," thought Randolph; "more than one touch of gentility, of
+fine feeling." If the father was in "some business," most likely it was
+some one else's business.
+
+"He sings," said Medora, further. "Entertained us the other Sunday
+afternoon. Cool and correct, but pleasant. No warmth, no passion. No
+special interest in any of my poor girls. I didn't feel that he was
+drawing any of them too near the danger-line."
+
+"Mighty gratifying, that. Where does one learn to sing without
+provoking danger?"
+
+"In a church choir, of course. He sang last year in the cathedral at
+Winnebago."
+
+"Oh, in Wisconsin. And what took us to Winnebago, I wonder?"
+
+"We were teaching in a college there."
+
+"I see."
+
+The talk languished. Basil Randolph had learned most that he wanted to
+know, and had learned it without asking too many direct questions. He
+began to pick at the fussy fringe on the arm of his chair and to cast
+an empty eye on the other fussy things that filled the room. The two
+had exhausted long ago all the old subjects, and he did not care to
+show an eagerness--still less, a continuing eagerness--for this new
+one: much could be picked up by indirection, even by waiting.
+
+Medora felt him as distrait. "Do you want to go up and see Joe for a
+little while before you leave us?"
+
+"I believe I will. Not that I've brought anything to read."
+
+"I doubt if he cares to be read to this time--Carolyn gave him the
+headlines this forenoon. He's a bit restless; I think he'd rather talk.
+If you have nothing more to say to me, perhaps you can find something
+to say to him."
+
+"Oh, come! I'm sure we've had a good enough little chat. Aren't you a
+bit restless yourself?"
+
+"Well, run along. I've heard his chair rolling about up there for the
+last half hour."
+
+
+
+
+5
+
+_COPE IS CONSIDERED FURTHER_
+
+
+Randolph took the stairs to the second floor, and presently his
+footfalls were heard on the bare treads that led from the second to the
+third. At the top landing he paused and looked in through the open door
+of the picture-gallery.
+
+Over the varnished oak floor of this roomy apartment a middle-aged man
+who wore a green shade above his eyes was propelling himself in a
+wheeled chair. Thus did Joseph Foster cover the space where the younger
+and more fortunate sometimes danced, and thus did he move among works
+of art which, even on the brightest days, he could barely see.
+
+He knew the step. "Brought anything?" he asked.
+
+He depended on Randolph for the latest brief doings in current fiction;
+and usually in the background--and often long in abeyance--was
+something in the way of memoirs or biography, many-volumed, which could
+fill the empty hours either through retrospect or anticipation.
+
+"Only myself," replied the other, stepping in. Foster dextrously
+manoeuvred his chair toward the entrance and reached out his hand.
+
+"Well, yourself is enough. It's good to have a man about the place once
+in a while. Once in a while, I said. It gets tiresome, hearing all
+those girls slithering and chattering through the halls." He put his
+bony hands back on the rims of his wheels. "Where have you been all
+this time?"
+
+"Oh, you know I come when I can." Randolph ran his eye over the walls
+of the big empty room. The pictures were all in place--landscapes,
+figure-pieces, what not; everything as familiar as the form of words he
+had just employed to meet an oft repeated query implying indifference
+and neglect.
+
+"How is it outside? I haven't been down on the street for a month."
+
+"Oh, things are bright and pleasant enough." Through the wide window
+there appeared, half a mile away, the square twin towers of the
+University library, reminiscent of Oxford and Ely. Round them lesser
+towers and gables, scholastic in their gray stone, rose above the trees
+of the campus. Beyond all these a level line of watery blue ran for
+miles and provided an eventless horizon. A bright and pleasant enough
+sight indeed, but nothing for Joe Foster.
+
+"Well, let me by," he said, "and we'll get along to my own room." The
+resonant bigness of the "gallery" was far removed from the intimate and
+the sociable.
+
+To the side of this bare place, with its canvases which had become
+rather démodé--or at least had long ceased to interest--lay two
+bed-chambers: Foster's own, and one adjoining, which was classed as a
+spare room. It was sometimes given over to visiting luminaries of
+lesser magnitudes. Real celebrities--those of national or international
+fame--were entertained in a sumptuous suite on the floor below. Casual
+young bachelors, who sometimes happened along, were lodged above and
+were expected to adjust themselves, as regarded the bathroom, to the
+use and wont of the occupant adjoining.
+
+Foster's own room was a cramped omnium gatherum, cluttered with the
+paraphernalia of daily living. It was somewhat disordered and
+untidy--the chamber of a man who could never see clearly how things
+were, or be completely sure just what he was about.
+
+"There's Pepys up there," he said, pointing to his bookshelf, as he
+worked out of his chair and tried to dispose himself comfortably on a
+couch. "I hope we're going to get along a little farther with him, some
+time."
+
+"As to that, I _have_ been getting along a little farther;--I've been
+to the Library, looking somewhat ahead in the completer edition. I find
+that 'Will,' who flung his cloak over his shoulder, 'like a ruffian,'
+and got his ears boxed for it, was no mere temporary serving-man, but
+lived on with Pepys for years and became the most intimate and trusted
+of his friends. And 'Gosnell,' who lasted three days, you remember, as
+Mrs. Pepys' maid, turns up a year or two later as an actress at 'the
+Duke's house.' And 'Deb,' that other maid whose name we have noted
+farther along--well, there's a deal more about her than exactly tends
+to edification...."
+
+"Good. I hope we shall have some more of it pretty soon."
+
+"To-day?"
+
+"Not exactly to-day. I've got some other things to think about."
+
+"Such as?"
+
+"Well, I expect you're going to be invited here to dinner pretty soon?"
+
+"So? I've been invited here to dinner before this."
+
+"But another day has come. A new light has risen. I haven't seen it,
+but I've heard it. I've heard it sing."
+
+"A light singing? Aren't you getting mixed?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. There was Viollet-le-Duc and the rose-window of
+Notre Dame. They took him there as a child for a choral service, and he
+thought it was the rose itself that sang. And there was Petrarch, and
+the young Milton--both talking about 'melodious tears'--and something
+of the same sort in 'The Blessed Damosel.' And----"
+
+"A psychological catch for which there ought to be a name. Perhaps
+there _is_ a name."
+
+"Well, as I say, the light rose, shone, and sang. I didn't see it--I
+never see anybody. But his voice came up here quite distinctly. It
+seemed good to have a man in the house. Those everlasting girls--I hope
+he wasn't bothering to sing for _them_."
+
+"He probably was. How did it go?"
+
+"Very well indeed."
+
+"What kind of voice?"
+
+"Oh, baritone, I suppose you'd call it."
+
+"And he sang sentimental rubbish?"
+
+"Not at all. Really good things."
+
+"With passion?"
+
+"Well, hardly. With cool correctness. An icicle on Diana's temple--that
+would be my guess."
+
+"An icicle? No wonder the young ladies don't quite fancy him."
+
+"I understand he took them all in a lump--so far as he took them at
+all. Treated them all exactly alike; Hortense was quite scornful when
+she brought up my lunch-tray. Of course that's no way for a man to do."
+
+"On the contrary. For certain purposes it might be a very good way."
+
+"'On the contrary,' if you like; since frost may perform the effects of
+fire. Medora herself is beginning to see him as a tall, white candle,
+burning in some niche or at some shrine. Sir Galahad--or something of
+that sort."
+
+Randolph grimaced at this.
+
+"Oh, misery! I hope she hasn't mentioned her impression to _him_!
+Imagine whether a man would enjoy being told a thing like that. I hope,
+I'm sure, that no 'Belle Dame sans Merci' will get on his tracks!"
+
+"If he goes in too much for 'palely loitering' he may be snatched."
+
+"Poor fellow! They'd better leave him to his studies and his students.
+He has his own way to make, I presume, and will need all his energies
+to get ahead. For, as some one has said, 'There are no tea-houses on
+the road to Parnassus.' Neither do tea-fights boost a man toward the
+Porch or Academe."
+
+"He's going in for teas?"
+
+"I won't say that. But it was at a tea that I met him. A trigonometry
+tea at little Mrs. Ryder's."
+
+"You've seen him then. You have the advantage of me. What's he like?"
+
+"Oh, he has points in his favor. He has looks; a trim figure, even if
+spare; well-squared shoulders; and manners with a breezy, original
+tang. The kind of young fellow that people are likely enough to like."
+
+"What kind of manners did he have for you?"
+
+"Well, there you rather get me. He called me 'sir,' with a touch of
+deference; yet somehow I felt as if I were standing too close to an
+electric fan."
+
+"Yes, even when they indulge a show of deference, they contrive to blow
+our gray hairs about our wrinkled temples."
+
+"Don't talk about gray hairs. You have none; and mine are not always
+seen at first glance."
+
+"Medora begins to tax me with a few. Don't you see any?"
+
+"Not one. I concentrate on my own. Tush, you're only forty-seven."
+
+"Or fifty-seven, or sixty-seven, or seventy-seven...." Foster adjusted
+his green shade and attempted an easier disposition of his twisted
+limbs on the couch. "Well, forty-seven, as you suggest,--as you insist.
+How old is this young fellow?"
+
+"Twenty-four or twenty-five."
+
+"Well, they can make us seem either younger or older. That rests with
+ourselves. It's all in how we take them, I expect."
+
+"Better take them so as to make ourselves younger."
+
+"Then the other question."
+
+"How they take us?"
+
+"Yes. We're lucky, in this day and generation, if they take us at all."
+
+"You may be right," assented Randolph ruefully. "Yet there are gleams
+of hope. The more thoughtful among them have a kind of condescending
+pity to bestow----"
+
+"And the thoughtless?"
+
+"They can find uses for us. One of the faculty was telling me how he
+tried to give two or three of his juniors an outing at his cottage over
+in Michigan. Everything he gave they took for granted. And if anything
+was lacking they took--exceptions. Monopolized the boats; ignored the
+dinner-hour.... Sometimes I think that even the thoughtless are
+thoughtful in their own way and use us, if we happen to have lands and
+substance, purely as practical conveniences. I've been almost glad to
+think that I possess none myself."
+
+"Don't stay here and talk like that. This is one of my blue days."
+
+"I wish I had brought a novelette. Sure you don't want to hear a little
+more about the Countess of Castlemaine and the rascalities of the Navy
+Office?"
+
+"No; some other time, when I feel a bit more robust. It isn't every day
+that the mind can digest such a period with comfort."
+
+"Are we two old fogies beginning to wear on each other?"
+
+"I hope not. But when you go down, stop for Medora a minute and see if
+she hasn't got something to say."
+
+Medora--when he finally got down stairs--had.
+
+She laid some knitting on the drawing-room table and came out into the
+hall.
+
+"No reading this afternoon, I judge. What I heard, or seemed to hear,
+was a broken flow of talk."
+
+"No reading. Restless."
+
+"So I was afraid. I'd rather have one good steady voice purring along
+for him, and then I know he's all right. Carolyn has been too busy
+lately. What seems to have unsettled him?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. Young life, possibly."
+
+"Well, I've asked and asked the girls not to be quite so gay and
+chattery in the upper halls."
+
+"You can't keep girls quiet."
+
+"I don't want to--not everywhere and at all times."
+
+"I have an idea that a given number of girls make more noise in a house
+than the same number of young fellows. I know that they do in
+boarding-houses and rooming-houses, and I believe it's so as between
+sororities and fraternities. Put a noise-gauge in the main hall of the
+Alpha-Alpha house and another in the main hall of the Beta-Beta house,
+and the girls would run the score above the boys every time. If ever I
+build a sorority house, it will be for the Delta-Iota-Nus, and a statue
+of the great goddess DIN herself shall stand just within the entrance."
+
+"You discourage me. I was going to give a dinner."
+
+"Go ahead. A few remarks from me won't stop the course of your
+hospitality. Neither would a few orations. Neither would a few
+deliberative bodies assembled for a month of sessions, with every
+member talking from nine till six."
+
+"You think I indulge in too many?"
+
+"Too many what? Festivals? Puns?"
+
+Medora paused, a bit puzzled.
+
+"Puns? Why, I never, never----Oh, I see!"
+
+"Too many dinners? No. Who could?"
+
+"This one was to be a young people's dinner. I was going to invite you."
+
+"Thanks. Thanks. Thanks."
+
+"Still, if you think my girls are noisy...."
+
+"I was speaking of girls in numbers."
+
+"Well, Bertram Cope didn't find them so."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Why not, indeed? They collected in a silent little group behind my
+sofa...."
+
+"Puzzled? Awed?"
+
+"Fudge! Well, save Thursday."
+
+"Is he coming?"
+
+"I trust so."
+
+"Then they do need a constabulary to keep them quiet?"
+
+"Oh, hush!"
+
+"How many are you expecting to have? You know I don't enjoy large
+parties."
+
+
+"Could you stand ten?"
+
+"I think so."
+
+"Thursday, then," she said, with a definitive hand on the knob of the
+door.
+
+Randolph went down the front walk with a slight stir of elation--a
+feeling that had come to be an infrequent visitor enough. He hoped that
+the company would be not only predominantly youthful, but exclusively
+so--aside from the hostess and himself. And even she often had her
+young days and her young spots. It would doubtless be clamorous; yet
+clamor, understood and prepared for, might be met with composure.
+
+
+
+
+6
+
+_COPE DINES--AND TELLS ABOUT IT_
+
+
+Cope pushed away the last of the themes and put the cork back in the
+red-ink bottle. Here was a witless girl who seemed to think that
+Herrick and Cowper were contemporaries. The last sense to develop in
+the Western void was apparently the sense of chronology--unless,
+indeed, it were a sense for the shades of difference which served to
+distinguish between one age and another and provided the raw material
+that made chronology a matter of consequence at all.
+
+"If there were only one more," muttered Cope, looking at the pile of
+sheets under the gas-globe, "I should probably learn that Chaucer
+derived from Beaumont and Fletcher."
+
+He reached up and jerked the gas-jet to a different angle. The flame
+lit, through its nicked, pale-pink globe, a bedroom cramped in size and
+meagre in furnishings: a narrow bed, dressed to look like a lounge; two
+stiff-backed oak chairs, not lately varnished; a bookshelf overhead,
+with some dozen of the more indispensable aids to our tongue's
+literature. The table at which he sat was one of plain deal, covered
+with some Oriental-seeming fabric which showed here and there inkspots
+that antedated his own pen. He threw up this covering as it fell over
+the front edge of the table, pulled out a drawer, laid a sheet of paper
+in the bettered light, and uncorked a black-ink bottle.
+
+"Dear Arthur," he began.
+
+He looked across to the other chair, with its broken spindles and
+obfuscated varnish. With things as he wanted them, his correspondent
+would be sitting there and letter-writing would be unnecessary.
+
+"Dear Arthur," he repeated aloud, and set himself to a general sketch
+of the new land and the "lay" of it.
+
+"Three-quarters of them are of course girls," he presently found
+himself writing, "which is the common proportion almost everywhere, I
+presume, except in engineering and dentistry. However, there are four
+or five men. I've been pretty careful, and they still treat me with
+respect. I'm afraid my course is regarded as a 'snap.' Everybody, it
+seems, can grasp English literature (and produce it). And almost
+anybody, I begin to fear, can teach it. Judging, that is, from the pay.
+I'm afraid the good folks at Freeford will find themselves pinched for
+another year still."
+
+He glanced across toward the pile of corrected themes. He felt that not
+everybody was "called," as a matter of course, to write English, and he
+stubbornly nourished the belief that toiling over others' imperfections
+was more of a job than boards of trustees always realized.
+
+"Of course," he presently resumed, "things are rather changed from what
+they were before. I find more in the way of social opportunities and
+greater interest shown by the middle-aged. It is no disadvantage to
+cultivate people who have their own homes; the lunch-rooms round the
+fountain-square are numerous enough, but not so good as they might be.
+And I don't know but that an instructor may lose caste by eating among
+a miscellany of undergraduates. Anyhow, it's no plan to pursue for
+long."
+
+He sat for a moment, lost in thought over recent social experiences.
+
+"One very good house has lately been opened to me," he continued. "I
+dined there last Thursday evening. It's really quite a mansion--a great
+many large rooms: picture-gallery, ballroom, and all that; and the
+dinner itself was very handsomely done. You know my theory,--a theory
+rather forced upon me, in truth, by circumstances,--that the best way
+to enjoy a good meal is to have had a string of poor ones. Well, since
+coming back, and with no permanent arrangements made, I have had plenty
+of chance for getting into position to appreciate the really
+first-class. There was a color-scheme in pale pink--ribbons of that
+color, pink icing on the cakes, and so on. The same thing could be
+done, and done charmingly, in light green--with pistache ice-cream. Of
+course the candle-shades were pink too."
+
+His eye wandered toward a small triangular closet, made off from the
+room by a flimsy and faded calico-print curtain.
+
+"I had my dress-suit cleaned and pressed, but the lapels of the coat
+came out rather shiny, and I thought it better to hire one for the
+occasion. There was no trouble about a fit--I have standardized
+shoulders, as you know.
+
+"Of course I miss you all the time, and I assuredly missed you just
+here. If it is really true, as you write, that you are holding your
+summer gains and weigh twelve pounds more than you did at the end of
+June, and if you are thinking of getting a new suit, please bear in
+mind that my own won't last much longer. I have the chance, now, to go
+out a good deal and to meet influential, worth-while people. In the
+circumstances I ask you not to bant. One rather spare man in a pair of
+men is enough.
+
+"My hostess, a Mrs. Phillips, I met at a tea during my first week. This
+tea was given by a lady in the mathematical department, and she and her
+husband were at the dinner. They are people in the early or middle
+thirties, I judge, and were probably put in as a connecting link
+between the two sections of the party. Mrs. Phillips herself is a rich
+widow of forty-odd--forty-five or six, possibly,--though I am not the
+very best judge in such matters: no need to tell you that, on such a
+point, my eye and my general sense are none too acute. The only other
+middle-aged (or elderly) person present was a Mr. Randolph, who is
+perhaps fifty, or a little beyond, yet who appears to have his younger
+moments. There were some girls, and there were two young men in
+business in the city--neighbors and not connected with the University
+at all. 'For which relief,' etc.,--since it _is_ a bit benumbing to
+move in academic circles exclusively;--I should hate to feel that a
+really professorial manner was stealing over me. Well, everybody was
+lively and gay, except at first Ryder (he's the math. man); but even he
+limbered up finally. Mrs. Phillips herself has a great deal of action
+and vivacity--seemed hardly more than thirty. Well, I could be pretty
+gay too with a lot of money behind me; and I think that, for another
+year or so, I can contrive to be gay without it. But after that....
+
+"I wish you had been there instead of Ryder. If you are really going to
+be twenty-seven in November--as I figure it--you might yourself have
+served as a connecting link between youth and age. No, no; I take it
+back; I didn't mean it. I wouldn't have you seem older for anything,
+and you know it.
+
+"There were three girls. They all live in the house itself, forming a
+little court: Mrs. P. seems to need young life and young attentions. So
+not one of them had to be taken home--there's usually _that_ to do, you
+know. Not that it would have mattered much, as the distances would have
+been short and the night was clear starlight. But they could all stay
+where they were, and I walked home in quite different company."
+
+Cope threw back his Oriental table-cover once more and drew out a few
+additional sheets of paper.
+
+"One of them is an artist. She paints portraits, and possibly other
+things. Oh, I was going to say there is an art-gallery at the top of
+the house. Her husband--I mean Mrs. Phillips'--was a painter and
+collector himself; and after dinner we went up there, and a curious man
+came in, propelling a wheeled chair--a sort of death's-head at the
+feast.... But don't let me get too far away from the matter in hand.
+She is dark and a bit tonguey--the artist-girl; and I believe she would
+be sarcastic and witty if she weren't held down pretty well. I think
+she's a niece: the relationship leaves her free, as I suppose she
+feels, to express herself. If you like the type you may have it; but
+wit in a woman, or even humor, always makes me uncomfortable. The
+feminine idea of either is a little different from ours.
+
+"Another girl is a musician. She plays the violin--quite tolerably.
+Yes, yes, I recall your views about violin-playing: it's either good or
+bad--nothing between. I'll say this, then: she played some simple and
+unpretentious things and did them very deftly. Simple, unpretentious:
+oddest thing in the world, for she is a recent graduate of our school
+of music and began this fall as an instructor. Wouldn't you have
+expected to find her demanding a chance to perform a sonata at the
+least, or pining miserably for a concerto with full orchestra? Well,
+this young lady I put down as a plain boarder--you can't maintain a big
+house on memories and a collection of paintings. She's a nice child,
+and I dare say makes as good a boarder as any nice child could.
+
+"The third girl--if you want to hear any more about them--seems to be a
+secretary. Think of having the run of a house where a social secretary
+is required! I'm sure she sends out the invitations and keeps the
+engagement-book. Besides all that, she writes poetry--she is the
+minstrel of the court. She does verses about her chatelaine--is quite
+the mistress of self-respecting adulation. _She_ would know the
+difference between Herrick and Cowper!"...
+
+Cope pulled out his watch. Then he resumed.
+
+"It's half past ten, but I think I'll run on for a few moments longer.
+If I don't finish, I can wind up to-morrow.--Mr. Randolph sat opposite
+me. He looked at me a lot and gave attention to whatever I
+said--whether said to him, or to my neighbors right and left, or to the
+whole table. I didn't feel him especially clever, but easy and
+pleasant--and friendly. Also a little shy--even after we had gone up to
+the ball-room. I'm afraid that made me more talkative than ever; you
+know how shyness in another man makes me all the more confident and
+rackety. Be sure that voice of mine rang out! But not in song. There
+was a piano up stairs, of course, and that led to a little dancing.
+Different people took turns in playing. I danced--once--with each of
+the three girls, and twice with my hostess; then I let Ryder and the
+two young business-men do the rest. Randolph danced once with Mrs.
+Phillips, and that ended it for him. My own dancing, as you know, is
+nothing to brag of: I think the young ladies were quite satisfied with
+the little I did. I'm sure _I_ was. You also know my views on round
+dances. Why dancing should be done exclusively by couples arranged
+strictly on the basis of contrasted sexes...! I think of the good old
+days of the Renaissance in Italy, when women, if they wanted to dance,
+just got up and danced--alone, or, if they didn't want to dance alone,
+danced together. I like to see soldiers or sailors dance in pairs, as a
+straightforward outlet for superfluous physical energy. Also, peasants
+in a ring--about a Maypole or something. Also, I very much like square
+dances and reels. There were enough that night for a quadrille, with
+somebody for the piano and even somebody to 'call off,'--but whoever
+sees a quadrille in these days? However, I mustn't burn any more gas on
+this topic.
+
+"I sat out several dances between Mrs. Phillips and Mr. Randolph. He
+thought he had done enough for her, and she thought I had done enough
+for them all. And one of the young business-men did enough for that
+springy, still-young Mrs. Ryder. Once, indeed, Mrs. Phillips asked me
+if I wouldn't like to try a third dance with her (she goes at it with a
+good deal of old-time vivacity and vim); but I told her she must know
+by this time that I was something of a bungler. 'I wouldn't quite say
+that,' she returned, smiling; but we continued to sit there side by
+side on a sort of bench built against the wall, and she seemed as well
+pleased to have it that way as the other. She did, however, speak about
+a little singing. I told her that she must have found me something of a
+bungler there, too, and reminded her that I couldn't play the
+accompaniments of my best songs at all. Arthur, my dear boy, I depend
+on _you_ for that, and you must come down here and do it. No singing,
+then. But Mrs. Phillips was not quite satisfied. Wouldn't I recite
+something? Heavens! Well, of course I know lots of poems--_c'est mon
+metier_. I repeated one. Then other volunteers were called upon--it was
+entertaining with a vengeance! The young ladies had to chip in
+also--though they, of course, were prepared to. And one of the young
+business-men did some clever juggling; and Mrs. Ryder sang a little
+French ballade; and Mr. Randolph--poor man!--was suddenly routed out of
+his placidity, and responded as well as he could with one or two little
+stories, not very pointed and not very well told. But I judge he makes
+no great claim to being a _raconteur_--he was merely paying an
+unexpected tax as gracefully as he could.
+
+"Well, as I was saying, the man in the wheeled chair came in. Of course
+he hadn't been down to dinner--I think I saw a tray for him carried
+along the hall. As he was working his way through the door, I suppose I
+must have been talking and laughing at my loudest; and that big, bare
+room, done in hard wood, made me seem noisier still. He sort of stopped
+and twitched, and appeared to shrink back in his chair: I presume my
+tones went straight through the poor twisted invalid's head. He must
+have fancied me (from the racket I was making) as a sort of
+free-and-easy Hercules (which is not quite the case), if not as the
+whole football squad rolled into one. Whether he really saw me, then or
+thereafter, I don't know; he wore a sort of green shade over his eyes.
+Of course I met him in due form. I tried not to give his poor hand too
+much of a wring (another of my bad habits); but he took all I gave and
+even seemed to hang on for a little more. He sat quietly to one side
+for a while, and I tried not to act the bull of Bashan again. Anyhow,
+he didn't start a second time. Presently he pulled out rather
+unceremoniously: the two young business-men had begun a sort of
+burlesque fandango, and their feet were pretty noisy on the bare floor.
+He started off after looking toward the piano and then toward me; and
+Mrs. Phillips glanced about as if to hint that any display of surprise
+or of indulgence would be misplaced. Poor chap!--well, I'm glad he
+didn't see me dancing.
+
+"We broke up about eleven, and Mr. Randolph suggested that, as we lived
+in the same general direction, we might walk homeward together. Great
+heaven! it's eleven--and five after--now! Enough, in all conscience,
+for to-night. You shall have the rest to-morrow."
+
+
+
+
+7
+
+_COPE UNDER SCRUTINY_
+
+
+An evening or two later Cope again corked his red ink and uncorked his
+black.
+
+"As I have said, Mr. Randolph and I walked home together. He stopped
+for a moment in front of his place. Another large, handsome house. He
+told me he had the use of his quarters as long as his landlord's lease
+ran, and asked me to come round some time and see how he was fixed.
+Then he said suddenly that the evening was fine and the night young and
+that he would walk on with me to _my_ quarters, if I didn't mind. Of
+course I didn't--he seemed so friendly and pleasant; but I let him
+learn for himself that I was far from being lodged in any architectural
+monument. Well, we went on for the necessary ten minutes, and he didn't
+seem at all put out by the mediocre aspect of the house where I have
+put up. He sort of took it all for granted--as if he knew about it
+already. In fact, on the way from his place to mine, I no more led him
+(as I sense it now) than he led me. He hesitated at no corner or
+crossing. 'I am an old Churchtonian,' he said incidentally--as if he
+knew everything and everybody. He also mentioned, just as incidentally,
+that he had a brother-in-law on our board of trustees. Of course I
+promised to go round and see him. I presume that I shall drop in on him
+some time or other. Come down here, and you shall have one more house
+of call.
+
+"He stopped for a moment in front of my diggings, taking my hand to say
+goodnight and taking his own time in dropping it. Enough is enough.
+'You have the small change needed for paying your way through society,'
+he said, with a sort of smile. 'I must cultivate a few little arts
+myself,' he went on; 'they seem necessary in some houses. But I'm glad,
+after all, that I didn't remember to-night that a tribute was likely to
+be levied; it would have taken away my appetite and have made the whole
+evening a misery in advance. As things went, I had, on the whole, a
+pleasant time. Only, I understood that you sang; and I was rather
+hoping to hear you.' 'I do best with my regular accompanist,' I
+returned--meaning you, of course. I hope you don't mind being degraded
+to that level. 'And your regular accompanist is not--not----?' 'Is
+miles away,' I replied. 'A hundred and fifty of them,' I might have
+added, if I had chosen to be specific. Now, if he had wanted to hear
+me, why hadn't he asked? He would have needed only to second Mrs.
+Phillips herself; and there he was, just on the other side of me. In
+consequence of his reticence I was driven--or drove myself--to blank
+verse. And that other man, the one in the chair; he may have had his
+expectations too. Arthur, Arthur, try to grasp the situation! You must
+come down here, and you must bring your hands with you. Tell the bishop
+and the precentor that you are needed elsewhere. They will let you off.
+Of course I know that a village choir needs every tenor it can get--and
+keep; but come. If they insist, leave your voice behind; but do bring
+your hands and your reading eye. Don't let me go along making my new
+circle think I'm an utter dub. Tell your father plainly that he can
+never in the world make a wholesale-hardware-man out of you. Force him
+to listen to reason. What is one year spent in finding out just what
+you are fit for? Come along; I miss you like the devil; nobody does my
+things as sympathetically as you do. Give up your old anthems and your
+old tinware and tenpennies and come along. I can bolt from this hole at
+a week's notice, and we can go into quarters together: a real bed
+instead of an upholstered shelf, and a closet big enough for two
+wardrobes (if mine really deserves the name). We could get our own
+breakfast, and you could take a course in something or other till you
+found out just what the Big Town could do for you. In any event you
+would be bearing me company, and your company is what I need. So pack
+up and appear."
+
+The delay in the posting of this appeal soon brought from Winnebago a
+letter outside the usual course of correspondence. It was on a fresh
+sheet and under a new date-line that Cope continued. After a page of
+generalities and of attention to particular points in the letter from
+Wisconsin, Cope took up his own line of thought.
+
+"I had meant, of course, to look in on him within a few days,--no great
+hurry about it. But on Sunday evening he wrote and asked if he might
+not call round on me instead. My name is not in the telephone-book;
+neither, as I found out, was his. So I used up a sheet of paper, an
+envelope, and a stamp--just such as I am now using on you--to tell him
+that he might indeed. I put in the 'indeed' for cordiality, hoping he
+wouldn't think I had slighted _his_ invitation. On Monday evening he
+came round--I must have reached him by the late afternoon delivery.
+Need I say that he had to take this poor place as he found it? But
+there was no sign of the once-over--no tendency to inventory or
+appraise. He sat down beside me on the couch just as if he had no
+notion that it was a bed (and a rather rocky one, at that), and talked
+about my row of books, and about music and plays, and about his own
+collection of curios--all in a quiet, contained way, yet intent on me
+if not on my outfit. Well, it's pleasant to be considered for what you
+are rather than for what you have (or for what few poor sticks your
+landlady may have); and I rather liked his being here. Certainly he was
+a change from my students, who sometimes seem to exclude better timber.
+
+"Needless to say, he repeated his invitation, and last evening I
+shunted Middle English (in which I have a lot to catch up) and walked
+round to him. Very adequately and handsomely lodged. Really good
+bachelor quarters (I hadn't known for certain whether he was married or
+not). A stockbroker of a sort, I hear,--but not enough to hurt, I
+should guess. He has a library and a sitting-room. Like me, he sleeps
+three-quarters, but he doesn't have to sit on his bed in the daytime.
+And he has a bathrobe of just the sort I shall have, when I can afford
+it. He has got together a lot of knick-knacks and curios, but takes
+them lightly.
+
+"'Sorry I've only one big arm-chair,' he said, handing me his
+cigarette-case and settling me down in comfort; 'but I entertain very
+seldom. I should like to be hospitable,' he went on; '--I really think
+it's in me; but that's pretty much out of the question here. I have no
+chef, no dining-room of my own, no ball-room, certainly.... Perhaps,
+before very long, I shall have to make a change.'
+
+"He asked me about Freeford, and I didn't realize until I was on my way
+back that he had assumed my home town just as he had assumed my
+lodging. Well, all right; I never resent a friendly interest. He sat in
+a less-easy chair and blew his smoke-rings and wondered if I had been a
+small-town boy. 'I'm one, too,' he said; '--at least Churchton, forty
+years--at least Churchton, thirty years ago, was not all it is to-day.
+It has always had its own special tone, of course; but in my young--in
+my younger days it was just a large country village. Fewer of us went
+into town to make money, or to spend it.'...
+
+"And then he asked me to go into town, one evening soon, and help him
+spend some. He suggested it rather shyly; _à tâtons_, I will
+say--though French is not my business. He offered a dinner at a
+restaurant, and the theatre afterwards. Did I accept? Indeed I did.
+Think, Arthur! after all the movies and restaurants round the elms and
+the fountain (tho' you don't know them yet)! I will say, too, that his
+cigarettes were rather better than my own....
+
+"I suppose he is fully fifty; but he has his young days, I can see.
+Certainly his age doesn't obtrude,--doesn't bother me at all, though he
+sometimes seems conscious of it himself. He wears eye-glasses part of
+the time,--for dignity, I presume. He had them on when I came in, but
+they disappeared almost at once, and I saw them no more.
+
+"He asked me about my degree,--though I didn't remember having spoken
+of it. I couldn't but mention 'Shakespeare'--as the word goes; and you
+know that when I mention him, it always makes the other man mention
+Bacon. He did mention Bacon, and smiled. 'I've studied the cipher,' he
+said. 'All you need to make it go is a pair of texts--a long one and a
+short one--and two fonts of type, or their equivalent in penmanship.
+Two colors of ink, for example. You can put anything into anything. See
+here.' He reached up to a shelf and brought down a thin brown square
+note-book. 'Here's the alphabet,' he said; 'and here'--opening a little
+beyond--'is my use of it: one of my earliest exercises. I have put the
+first stanza of "Annabel Lee" into the second chapter of "Tom Jones."'
+He ignored the absent eye-glasses and picked out the red letters from
+the black with perfect ease. 'Simplest thing in the world,' he went on;
+'anybody can do it. All it needs is time and patience and care. And if
+you happen to be waggishly or fraudulently inclined you can give
+yourself considerable entertainment--and can entertain or puzzle other
+people later. You don't really believe that "Bacon wrote Shakespeare"?'
+
+"Of course I don't, Arthur,--as you very well know. I picked out the
+first line of 'Annabel Lee' by arranging the necessary groupings among
+the odd mixture of black and red letters he exhibited, and told him I
+didn't believe that Bacon wrote Shakespeare--nor that Shakespeare did
+either. 'Who did, then?' he naturally asked. I told him that I would
+grant, at the start and for a few seasons, a group of young noblemen
+and young gentlemen; but that some one of them (supposing there to have
+been more than that one) soon distanced all the rest and presently
+became the edifice before which the manager from Stratford was only the
+facade. He--this 'someone'--was a noble and a man of wide reach both in
+his natural endowments and in his acquired culture. But he couldn't dip
+openly into the London cesspool; he had his own quality to safeguard
+against the contamination of a new and none too highly-regarded trade.
+'I don't care for your shillings,' he said to Shaxper, 'nor for the
+printed plays afterward; but I do value your front and your footing and
+the services they can render me on my way to self-expression.' He was
+an earl, or something such, with a country-seat in Warwick, or on the
+borders of Gloucestershire; 'and if I only had a year and the money to
+make a journey among the manor-houses of mid-England,' I said, 'and to
+dig for a while in their muniment-rooms....' Well, you get the idea,
+all right enough.
+
+"He came across and sat on the arm of the big easy-chair. 'If you went
+over there and discovered all that, the English scholars would never
+forgive you.' As of course they wouldn't: look at the recent Shaxper
+discoveries by Americans in London! 'And wouldn't that be a rather
+sensational thesis,' he went on, 'from a staid candidate for an M.A.,
+or a Ph.D., or a Litt.D., or whatever it is you're after?' It would, of
+a verity; and why shouldn't it be? 'Don't go over there,' he ended with
+a smile, as he dropped his hand on my shoulder; 'your friends would
+rather have you here.' 'Never fear!' I returned; 'I can't possibly
+manage it. I shall just do something on "The Disjunctive Conjunctions
+in 'Paradise Lost,'" and let it go at that!'
+
+"He got up to reach for the ash-receiver. 'They tell me,' he said,
+'that a degree isn't much in itself--just an _étape_ on the journey to
+a better professional standing.' 'Yes,' said I, '--and to better
+professional rewards. It means so many more hundreds of dollars a year
+in pay.' But you know all about that, too.
+
+"I'm glad your dramatic club is getting forward so well with the
+rehearsals for its first drive of the season; glad too that, this time
+at least, they have given you a good part. Tell me all about it before
+the big stars in town begin to dim your people in my eyes--and in your
+own; and don't let them cast you for the next performance in January.
+You will be here by then.
+
+"Yours,
+
+"B.L.C."
+
+
+
+
+8
+
+_COPE UNDERTAKES AN EXCURSION_
+
+
+Two or three days later, Randolph met Medora Phillips in front of the
+bank. This was a neat and solemn little edifice opposite the elms and
+the fountain; it was neighbored by dry-goods stores, the offices of
+renting agencies, and the restaurants where the unfraternized
+undergraduates took their daily chances. Through its door passed
+tradesmen's clerks with deposits, and young housewives with babies in
+perambulators, and students with their small financial problems, and
+members of the faculty about to cash large or small checks. Mrs.
+Phillips had come across from the dry-goods store to pick up her
+monthly sheaf of vouchers,--it was the third of October.
+
+"Don't you want to come in for a minute?" she asked Randolph. "Then you
+can walk on with me to the stationer's. Carolyn tells me that our last
+batch of invitations reduced us to nothing. How did _your_ dinner go?"
+
+Randolph followed her into the cool marble interior. "Oh, in town, you
+mean? Quite well, I think. I'm sure my young man took a good honest
+appetite with him!"
+
+"I know. We don't do half enough for these poor boys."
+
+"Yes, he rose to the food. But not to the drinks. I took him, after
+all, to my club. I innocently suggested cocktails; but, no. He
+declined--in a deft but straightforward way. Country principles.
+Small-town morals. He made me feel like a--well, like a corrupter of
+youth."
+
+"You didn't mind, though,--of course you didn't. You liked it. Wasn't
+it noble! Wasn't it charming! So glad that _we_ had nothing but
+Apollinaris and birch beer! Still, it would have been a pleasure to
+hear him refuse."
+
+The receiving-teller gave her her vouchers. She put them in her handbag
+and somehow got round a perambulator, and the two went out on the
+street.
+
+"And how did your 'show' go?" she continued. "That's about as much as
+we can call the drama in these days."
+
+"That, possibly, didn't go quite so well. I took him to a 'comedy,'--as
+they nowadays call their mixture of farce and funniment. 'Comedy'!--I
+wish Meredith could have seen it! Well, he laughed a little, here and
+there,--obligingly, I might say. But there was no 'chew' in the thing
+for him,--nothing to fill his intellectual maw. He's a serious
+youngster, after all,--exuberant as he seems. I felt him appraising me
+as a gay old irresponsible...."
+
+"'Old'--you are not to use that word. Come, don't say that he--that he
+venerated you!"
+
+"Oh, not at all. During the six hours we were together--train, club,
+theatre, and train again--he never once called me 'sir'; he never once
+employed our clumsy, repellent Anglo-Saxon mode of address, 'mister';
+in fact, he never employed any mode of address at all. He got round it
+quite cleverly,--on system, as I soon began to perceive; and not for a
+moment did he forget that the system was in operation. He used,
+straight through, a sort of generalized manner--I might have been
+anywhere between twenty and sixty-five."
+
+They were now in front of the stationer's show-window, and there were
+few people in the quiet thoroughfare to jostle them.
+
+Medora smiled.
+
+"How clever; how charming!" she said. "Leaving you altogether free to
+pick your own age. I hope you didn't go beyond thirty-five. You must
+have been quite charming in your early thirties."
+
+"That's kind of you, I'm sure; but I don't believe that I was ever
+'charming' at _any_ age. I think you've used that word once too often.
+I was a quiet, studious lad, with nice notions, but possibly something
+of a prig. I was less 'charming' than correct. The young ladies had the
+greatest confidence in me,--not one of them was ever 'afraid'."
+
+"Why, how horrid! How utterly unsatisfactory! Nor their mothers?"
+
+"No. And I'm still single, as you're advised. And I'm not sure that the
+young gentlemen cared much more for me. If I had had a little more
+'gimp' and _verve_, I might have equalled the particular young
+gentleman of whom we have been discoursing. But...."
+
+His obviously artificial style of speech concealed, as she guessed,
+some real feeling.
+
+"Oh, if you insist on disparaging yourself...!"
+
+"I was quite as coolly correct as I apprehend him to be; and if I could
+only have contrived to compass the charming, as well, who knows
+what----?"
+
+"You don't like my word. Is there a better, a more suitable?"
+
+"No. You have the _mot juste_."
+
+He threw a finger through the wide pane of glass. "Is that the sort of
+thing you are after? Those boxes of pale gray are rather good."
+
+"I never buy from the show-window. Come in, and help me choose."
+
+"I love to shop," he said, in a mock ecstasy. "With others," he added.
+"I like to follow money in--and to contribute taste and experience."
+
+Over the stationer's counter she said:
+
+"Save Sunday. We are going out to the sand-hills."
+
+"Thank you. Very well. Most glad to."
+
+"And you are to bring him."
+
+"Him?"
+
+"Bertram Cope."
+
+"Why, I've given him six hours within two or three days. And now you're
+asking me to give him sixteen."
+
+"Sixteen--or more. But you're not giving them to him. You're giving
+them to all of us. You're giving them to me. The day is likely to be
+fine and settled, and I'd recommend your catching the 8:30 train. I
+shall have my full load in the car. And more, if I have to take along
+Helga. Try to reach us by one, or a quarter past."
+
+Mrs. Phillips had lately taken on a house among the sand dunes beyond
+the state line. This singular region had recently acquired so wide a
+reputation for utter neglect and desolation that--despite its distance
+from town, whether in miles or in hours--no one could quite afford to
+ignore it. Picnics, pageants, encampments and excursions all united in
+proclaiming its remoteness, its silence, its vacuity. Along the rim of
+ragged slopes which put a term to the hundreds of miles of water that
+spread from the north, people tramped, bathed, canoed, motored and
+week-ended. Within a few seasons Duneland had acquired as great a
+reputation for "prahlerische Dunkelheit"--for ostentatious
+obscurity--as ever was enjoyed even by Schiller's Wallenstein. "Lovers
+of Nature" and "Friends of the Landscape" moved through its distant and
+inaccessible purlieus in squads and cohorts. Everybody had to spend
+there at least one Sunday in the summer season. There were enthusiasts
+whose interest ran from March to November. There were fanatics who
+insisted on trips thitherward in January. And there were one or two
+super-fanatics--ranking ahead even of the fishermen and the
+sand-diggers--who clung to that weird and changing region the whole
+year through.
+
+Medora Phillips' house was several miles beyond the worst of the
+hurly-burly. There were no tents in sight, even in August. Nor was the
+honk of the motor-horn heard even during the most tumultuous Sundays.
+The spot was harder to reach than most others along the twenty miles of
+nicked and ragged brim which helped enclose the wide blue area of the
+Big Water, but was better worth while when you got there. Her little
+tract lay beyond the more prosaic reaches that were furnished chiefly
+in the light green of deciduous trees; it was part of a long stretch
+thickly set for miles with the dark and sombre green of pines. Our
+nature-lover had taken, the year before, a neglected and dilapidated
+old farmhouse and had made it into what her friends and habitues liked
+to call a bungalow. The house had been put up--in the rustic spirit
+which ignores all considerations of landscape and outlook--behind a
+well-treed dune which allowed but the merest glimpse of the lake;
+however, a walk of six or eight minutes led down to the beach, and in
+the late afternoon the sun came with grand effect across the gilded
+water and through the tall pine-trunks which bordered the zig-zag path.
+Medora had added a sleeping porch, a dining-porch and a lean-to for the
+car; and she entertained there through the summer lavishly, even if
+intermittently and casually.
+
+"No place in the world like it!" she would declare enthusiastically to
+the yet inexperienced and therefore the still unconverted. "The spring
+arrives weeks ahead of our spring in town, and the fall lingers on for
+weeks after. Come to our shore, where the fauna and flora of the whole
+country meet in one. All the wild birds pass in their migrations; and
+the flowers!" Then she would expatiate on the trailing arbutus in
+April, and the vast sheets of pale blue lupines in early June, and the
+yellow, sunlike blossoms of the prickly-pear in July, and the red
+glories of painter's-brush and bittersweet and sumach in September. "No
+wonder," she would say, "that they have to distribute handbills on the
+excursion-trains asking people to leave the flowers alone!"
+
+"How shocking!" Cope had cried, with his resonant laugh, when this
+phase of the situation was brought to his attention. "Are the
+automobile people any better?"
+
+Randolph had told him of some of the other drawbacks involved in the
+excursion. "It's a long way to go, even when you pass up the trolley
+and make a single big bolt by train. And it leads through an industrial
+region that is mighty unprepossessing--little beauty until almost the
+end. And even when you get there, it may all seem a slight and simple
+affair for the time and trouble taken--unless you really like Nature.
+And lastly," he said, with a sidelong glance at Cope, "you may find
+yourself, as the day wears on, getting a little too much of my company."
+
+"Oh, I hope that doesn't mean," returned Cope, with another ingenuous
+unchaining of his native resonance, "that you are afraid of getting a
+little too much of mine! I'm fond of novelty, and nobody can frighten
+me."
+
+"If that's the case, let's get away as early in the day as we can.
+Breakfasts, of course, are late in every household on Sunday. So let's
+meet at the Maroon-and-Purple Tavern at seven-thirty, and make a flying
+start at eight."
+
+Sunday morning came clear and calm and warm to the town,--a belated
+September day, or possibly an early intimation of Indian summer,--and
+it promised to be even more delightful in the favored region toward
+which our friends were journeying. After they had cleared many miles of
+foundries and railroad crossings, and had paralleled for a last
+half-hour a distant succession of sandhills, wooded or glistening
+white, they were set down at a small group of farmhouses, with a varied
+walk of five miles before them. Half a mile through a shaded country
+lane; another half-mile along a path that led across low, damp ground
+through thickets of hazel and brier; a third half-mile over a light
+soil, increasingly sandy, beneath oaks and lindens and pines which
+cloaked the outlines of the slopes ahead; and finally a great mound of
+pure sand that slanted up into a blue sky and made its own horizon.
+
+"We've taken things easy," said Randolph, who had been that way before,
+"and I hope we have enough breath left for our job. There it lies,
+right in front of us."
+
+"No favor asked here," declared Cope. He gave a sly, sidewise glance,
+as if to ask how the other might stand as to leg-muscles and wind.
+
+"Up we go," said Randolph.
+
+
+
+
+9
+
+_COPE ON THE EDGE OF THINGS_
+
+
+The adventurer in Duneland hardly knows, as he works his way through
+one of the infrequent "blow-outs," whether to thank Nature for her aid
+or to tax her with her cruelty. She offers few other means of reaching
+the water save for these nicks in the edges of the great cup; yet it is
+possible enough to view her as a careless and reckless handmaiden
+busily devastating the cosmical china-closet. The "blow-out" is a
+tragedy, and the cause of further tragedy. The north winds, in the
+impetus gathered through a long, unimpeded flight over three hundred
+miles of water, ceaselessly try and test the sandy bulwarks for a
+slightest opening. The flaw once found, the work of devastation and
+desolation begins; and, once begun, it continues without cessation.
+Every hurricane cuts a wider and deeper gash, fills the air with clouds
+of loose sand, and gives sinister addition to the white shifting heaps
+and fields that steal slowly yet unrelentingly over the green
+hinterland of forest which lies below the southern slopes. Trees yet to
+die stand in passive bands at their feet; the stark, black trunks of
+trees long dead rise here and there in spots where the sand-glacier has
+done its work of ruin and passed on.
+
+After some moments of scrambling and panting our two travelers gained
+the divide. Below them sloped a great amphitheatre of sand, falling in
+irregular gradations; and at the foot of all lay the lake, calmly
+azure, with its horizon, whether near or far for it was almost
+impossible to say--mystically vague. On either hand rose other hills of
+sand, set with sparse pines and covered, in patches, with growths of
+wild grape, the fruit half ripened. Within the amphitheatre, at various
+levels, rose grimly a few stumps and shreds of cedars long dead and
+long indifferent to the future ravages of the enemy. The whole scene
+was, to-day, plausibly gentle and inert. It was indeed a bridal of
+earth and sky, with the self-contained approval of the blue deep and no
+counter-assertion from any demon wind.
+
+"So far, so good," said Randolph, taking off his hat, wiping his
+forehead, and breathing just a little harder than he liked. "The rest
+of our course is plain: down those slopes, and then a couple of miles
+along the shore. Easy walking, that; a mere promenade on a boulevard."
+
+Cope stood on the height, and tossed his bare head like a tireless
+young colt. The sun fell bright on his mane of yellow hair. He took in
+a deep breath. "It's good!" he declared. "It's great! And the water
+looks better yet. Shall we make it in a rush?"
+
+He began to plunge down the long, broken sand-slope. Each step was
+worth ten. Randolph followed--with judgment. He would not seem young
+enough to be a competitor, nor yet old enough to be a drag. On the
+shore he wiped and panted a little more--but not to the point of
+embarrassment, and still less to the point of mortification. After all,
+he was keeping up pretty well.
+
+At the bottom Cope, with his shoes full of sand, turned round and
+looked up the slope down which his companion was coming. He waved his
+arms. "It's almost as fine from here!" he cried.
+
+The beach, once gained, was in sight both ways for miles. Not a human
+habitation was visible, nor a human being. Two or three gulls flew a
+little out from shore, and the tracks of a sandpiper led from the wet
+shingle to the first fringe of sandgrass higher up.
+
+"Where are the crowds?" asked Cope, with a sonorous shout.
+
+"Miles behind," replied Randolph. "We haven't come this long distance
+to meet them after all. Besides," he continued, looking at his watch,
+"this is not the time of day for them. At twelve-fifteen people are not
+strolling or tramping; they're thinking of their dinner. We have a full
+hour or more for making less than two easy miles before we reach
+_ours_."
+
+"No need to hurry, then."
+
+The beach, at its edge, was firm, and they strolled on for half a mile
+and cooled off as they went. The air was mild; the noonday sun was
+warm; both of them had taken off their coats.
+
+They sat down under a clump of basswoods, the only trees beyond the
+foot of the sand-slope, and looked at the water.
+
+"It's like a big, useless bathtub," observed Randolph.
+
+"Not so much useless as unused."
+
+"Yes, I suppose the season _is_ as good as over,--though this end of
+the lake stays warm longer than most other parts."
+
+"It isn't so much the warmth of the water," remarked Cope
+sententiously. "It's more the warmth of the air."
+
+"Well, the air seems warm enough. After all, the air and the sun are
+about the best part of a swim. Do you want to go in?"
+
+Cope rose, walked to the edge of the water, and put in a finger or two.
+"Well, it might be warmer; but, as I say...."
+
+"We could try a ten-minute dip. That would get us to our dinner in good
+time and in good trim."
+
+"All right. Let's, then."
+
+"Only, you'll have to do most of the swimming," said Randolph. "My few
+small feats are all accomplished pretty close to shore."
+
+"Never mind. Company's the thing. A fellow finds it rather slow, going
+in alone."
+
+Cope whisked off his clothes with incredible rapidity and piled
+them--or flung them--under the basswoods: the suddenly resuscitated
+technique of the small-town lad who could take avail of any pond or any
+quiet stretch of river on the spur of the moment. He waded in quickly
+up to his waist, and then took an intrepid header. His lithe young legs
+and arms threw themselves about hither and yon. After a moment or two
+he got on his feet and made his way back across a yard of fine shingle
+to the sand itself. He was sputtering and gasping, and the long yellow
+hair, which usually lay in a flat clean sweep from forehead to occiput,
+now sprawled in a grotesque pattern round his temples.
+
+"B-r-r! It _is_ cold, sure enough. But jump in. The air will be all
+right. I'll be back with you in a moment."
+
+Randolph advanced to the edge, and felt in turn. It _was_ cold. But he
+meant to manage it here, just as he had managed with the sand-slopes.
+
+Two heads bobbed on the water where but one had bobbed before.
+Ceremonially, at least, the rite was complete.
+
+"It's never so cold the second time," declared Cope encouragingly. "One
+dip doesn't make a swim, any more than one swallow--"
+
+He flashed his soles in the sunlight and was once again immersed,
+gulping, in a maelstrom of his own making.
+
+"Twice, to oblige you," said Randolph. "But no more. I'll leave the
+rest to the sun and the air."
+
+Cope, out again, ran up and down the sands for a hundred feet or so. "I
+know something better than this," he declared presently. He threw
+himself down and rolled himself in the abundance of fine, dry, clean
+sand.
+
+"An arenaceous ulster--speaking etymologically," he said. He came back
+to the clump of basswoods near which Randolph was sitting on a short
+length of drift wood, with his back to the sun, and sat down beside him.
+
+"You're welcome to it," said Randolph, laughing; "but how are you going
+to get it off? By another dip? Certainly not by the slow process of
+time. We have some moments to spare, but hardly enough for that.
+Meanwhile...."
+
+He picked up a handful of sand and applied it to a bare shoulder-blade
+which somehow had failed to get its share of protection.
+
+"Thanks," said Cope: "the right thing done for Polynices. Yes, I shall
+take one final dip and dry myself on my handkerchief."
+
+"I shall dry by the other process, and so shall be able to spare you
+mine."
+
+
+"How much time have we yet?"
+
+Randolph reached for his trousers, as they hung on a lower branch of
+one of the basswoods. "Oh, a good three-quarters of an hour."
+
+"That's time enough, and to spare. I wonder whom we're going to meet."
+
+"There's a 'usual crowd': the three young ladies, commonly; one or two
+young men who understand how to tinker the oil-stove--which usually
+needs it--and how to prime the pump. They once asked me to do these
+things; but I've discovered that younger men enjoy it more than I do,
+so I let them do it. Besides these, a number of miscellaneous people,
+perhaps, who come out by trolley or in their own cars."
+
+"The young ladies always come?" asked Cope, brushing the sand from his
+chest.
+
+"Usually. Together. The Graces. Otherwise, what becomes of the Group?"
+
+"Well, I hope there'll be enough fellows to look after the stove and
+the pump--and them. I'm not much good at that last."
+
+"No?"
+
+"There's a knack about it--a technique--that I don't seem to possess.
+Nor do I seem greatly prompted to learn it."
+
+"Of course, there is no more reason for assuming that every man will
+make a good lover than that every woman will make a good mother or a
+good housekeeper."
+
+"Or that every adult male will make a good citizen, desiring the
+general welfare and bestirring himself to contribute his own share to
+it. I don't feel that I'm an especially creditable one."
+
+"So it runs. We ground our general life on theories, and then the facts
+come up and slap us in the face." Randolph rose and relieved the
+basswood of the first garments. "Are you about ready for that final
+dip?"
+
+Cope made his last plunge and returned red and shivering to use the two
+handkerchiefs.
+
+"Well, we have thirty minutes," said Randolph, as they resumed their
+march. On the one hand the ragged line of dunes with their draping,
+dense or slight, of pines, lindens and oaks; on the other the unruffled
+expanse of blue, spreading toward a horizon even less determinate than
+before.
+
+"No, I'm not at all apt," said Cope, returning to his theme; "not even
+for self-defense. I suppose I'm pretty sure to get caught some time or
+other."
+
+"Each woman according to her powers and gifts. Varying degrees of
+desire, of determination, of dexterity. To be just, I might add a
+fourth _d_--devotion."
+
+"You've run the gauntlet," said Cope. "You seem to have come through
+all right."
+
+"Well," Randolph returned deprecatingly, "I can't really claim ever to
+have enlisted any woman's best endeavors."
+
+"I hope I shall have the same good luck. Of your four _d_'s, it's the
+dexterity that gives me the most dread."
+
+"Yes, the appeal (not always honest) to chivalry,--though devotion is
+sometimes a close second. You're manoeuvred into a position where
+you're made to think you 'must.' I've known chaps to marry on that
+basis.... It's weary waiting until Madame dies and Madonna steps into
+her place."
+
+"Meanwhile, safety in numbers."
+
+"Yes, even though you're in the very midst of wishing or of
+wondering--or of a careful concern to cloak either."
+
+"Don't dwell on it! You fill me with apprehensions."
+
+Randolph put up his arm and pointed. A roof through a notch between two
+sandhills beyond a long range of them, was seen, set high and half
+hidden by the spreading limbs of pines. "There it is," he said.
+
+"So close, already?" Such, indeed, it appeared.
+
+"Not so close as it seems. We may just as well step lively."
+
+Cope, with an abundance of free action, was treading along on the very
+edge of things, careless of the rough shingle and indifferent to the
+probability of wet feet, and swinging his hat as he went. In some such
+spirit, perhaps, advanced young Stoutheart to the ogre's castle. He
+even began to foot it a little faster.
+
+"Well, I can keep up with you yet," thought Randolph. Aloud, he said:
+"You've done very well with your hair. Quite an inspiration to have
+carried a comb."
+
+Cope grimaced.
+
+"I trust I'm free to comb myself on Sunday. There are plenty of others
+to do it for me through the week."
+
+
+
+
+10
+
+_COPE AT HIS HOUSE PARTY_
+
+
+"You look as fit as two fiddles," said Medora Phillips, at the top of
+her sandhill.
+
+"We are," declared Randolph. "Have the rest of the orchestra arrived?"
+
+"Most of us are here, and the rest will arrive presently. Listen. I
+think I hear a honk somewhere back in the woods."
+
+The big room of the house, made by knocking two small rooms together,
+seemed fairly full already, and other guests were on the back porch.
+The Graces were there, putting the finishing-touches to the
+table--Helga had not come, after all, but had gone instead, with her
+young man, to spend a few sunny afternoon hours among the films. And
+one of the young business-men present at Mrs. Phillips' dinner was
+present here; he seemed to know how to handle the oil-stove and the
+pump (with the cooperation of the chauffeur), and how to aid the three
+handmaidens in putting on the knives, forks, plates and napkins that
+Helga had decided to ignore. The people in the distant motor-car became
+less distant; soon they stopped in a clearing at the foot of the hill,
+and before long they appeared at the top with a small hamper of
+provisions.
+
+"Oh, why didn't you ask _us_ to bring something!" cried Cope. Randolph
+shrugged his shoulders: he saw himself lugging a basket of eatables
+through five miles of sand and thicket.
+
+"You've brought yourself," declared Mrs. Phillips genially. "That's
+enough."
+
+There was room for the whole dozen on the dining-porch. The favored few
+in one corner of it could glimpse the blue plane of the lake, or at
+least catch the horizon; the rest could look over the treetops toward
+the changing colors of the wide marshes inland. And when the feast was
+over, the chauffeur took his refreshment off to one side, and then
+amiably lent a hand with the dishes.
+
+"Let me help wipe," cried Cope impulsively.
+
+"There are plenty of hands to help," returned his hostess. She seemed
+to be putting him on a higher plane and saving him for better things.
+
+One of the better things was a stroll over her tumultuous domain: the
+five miles he had already covered were not enough.
+
+"I'll stay where I am," declared Randolph, who had taken this
+regulation jaunt before. He followed Cope to the hook from which he was
+taking down his hat. "Admire everything," he counselled in a whisper.
+
+"Eh?"
+
+"Adjust yourself to our dominant mood without delay or reluctance.
+Praise promptly and fully everything that is ours."
+
+The party consisted of four or five of the younger people and two or
+three of the older. Most of them had taken the walk before; Cope, as a
+novice, became the especial care of Mrs. Phillips herself. The way led
+sandily along the crest of a wooded amphitheatre, with less stress on
+the prospect waterward than might have been expected. Cope was not
+allowed, indeed, to overlook the vague horizon where, through the pine
+groves, the blue of sky and of sea blended into one; but, under Medora
+Phillips' guidance, his eyes were mostly turned inland.
+
+"People think," she said, "that 'the Dunes' means nothing beyond a
+regular row of sandhills following the edge of the water; yet half the
+interest and three-quarters of the variety are to be found in behind
+them. See my wide marsh, off to the southeast, with those islands of
+tamarack here and there, and imagine how beautiful the shadows are
+toward sunset. Look at that thick wood at the foot of the slope: do you
+think it is flat? No, it's as humpy and hilly as anything ever
+traversed. Only this spring a fascinating murderer hid there for weeks,
+and last January we could hear the howls of timber-wolves driven down
+from Michigan by the cold. And see those tall dead pines rising above
+it all. I call them the Three Witches. You'll get them better just a
+few paces to the left. This way." She even placed her hand on his elbow
+to make sure that her tragic group should appear to highest advantage.
+Yes, he was an admirable young man, giving admirable attention;
+thrusting out his hat toward prospects of exceptional account and
+casting his frank blue eyes into her face between-times. Charmingly
+perfect teeth and a wonderful sweep of yellow hair. A highly civilized
+faun for her highly sylvan setting. Indifferent, perhaps, to her
+precious Trio; but there were other young fellows to look after _them_.
+
+Cope praised loudly and readily. The region was unique and every view
+had its charm--every view save one. Beyond the woods and the hills and
+the distant marshes which spread behind all these, there rose on the
+bluish horizon a sole tall chimney, with its long black streak of
+smoke. Below it and about it spread a vast rectangular structure with
+watch-towers at its corners. The chimney bespoke light and heat and
+power furnished in quantities--power for many shops, manned by
+compulsory workers: a prison, in short.
+
+"Why, what's that?" asked Cope tactlessly.
+
+Medora Phillips withheld her eyes and sent out a guiding finger in the
+opposite direction. "Only see the red of those maples!" she said; "and
+that other red just to the left--the tree with the small, fine leaves
+all aflame. Do you know what it is?"
+
+"I'm afraid not."
+
+"It's a tupelo. And this shrub, right here?" She took between her
+fingers one large, bland indented leaf on a small tree close to the
+path.
+
+Cope shook his head.
+
+"Why, it's a sassafras. And this?"--she thrust her toe into a thick,
+lustrous bed of tiny leaves that hugged the ground. "No, again? That's
+kinnikinnick. Oh, my poor boy, you have everything to learn. Brought up
+in the country, too!"
+
+"But, really," said Cope in defense, "Freeford isn't so small as
+_that_. And even in the country one may turn by preference to books.
+Try me on primroses and date-palms and pomegranates!"
+
+Medora broke off a branch of sassafras and swished it to and fro as she
+walked. "See," she said; "three kinds of leaves on the same tree: one
+without lobes, one with a single lobe, and one with two."
+
+"Isn't Nature wonderful," replied Cope easily.
+
+Meanwhile the young ladies sauntered along--before or behind, as the
+case might be--in the company of the young business-man and that of
+another youth who had come out independently on the trolley. They
+appeared to be suitably accompanied and entertained. But shiftings and
+readjustments ensued, as they are sure to do with a walking-party. Cope
+presently found himself scuffling through the thin grass and the briery
+thickets alongside the young business-man. He was a clever,
+companionable chap, but he declared himself all too soon, even in this
+remote Arcadia, as utterly true to type. Cope was not long in feeling
+him as operating on the unconscious assumption--unconscious, and
+therefore all the more damnable--that the young man in business
+constituted, ipso facto, a kind of norm by which other young men in
+other fields of endeavor were to be gauged: the farther they deviated
+from the standard he automatically set up, the more lamentable their
+deficiencies. A few condescending inquiries as to the academic life,
+that strange aberration from the normality of the practical and
+profitable course which made the ordinary life of the day, and the
+separation came. "Enough of _him_!" muttered Cope to himself presently,
+and began to cast about for other company. Amy Leffingwell was
+strolling along alone: he caught a branch of haw from before her
+meditative face and proffered a general remark about the beauty of the
+day and the interest in the changing prospect.
+
+Amy's pretty pink face brightened. "It _is_ a lovely day," she said.
+"And the more of this lovely weather we have in October--and especially
+in November--the more trouble it makes."
+
+"Surely you don't want rain or frost?"
+
+"No; but it becomes harder to shut the house up for good and all. Last
+fall we opened and closed two or three times. We even tried coming out
+in December."
+
+"In mackintoshes and rubber boots?"
+
+"Almost. But the boots are better for February. At least, they would
+have been last February."
+
+"It seems hard to imagine such a future for a place like this,--or such
+a past."
+
+"Things can be pretty rough, I assure you. And the roads are not always
+as good as they are to-day." And when the pump froze, she went on, they
+had to depend upon the lake; and when the lake froze they had to fall
+back on melted snow and ice. And even when the lake didn't freeze, the
+blowing waters and the flying sands often heaped up big ridges that
+quite cut them off from the open sea. Then they had to prospect along
+those tawny hummocks for some small inlet that would yield a few
+buckets of frozen spray, keeping on the right side of the deep fissures
+that held the threat of icebergs to be cast loose at any moment; "and
+sometimes," she added, in search of a little thrill, "we would get back
+toward shore to find deep openings with clear water dashing beneath--we
+had been walking on a mere snow-crust half the time."
+
+"Most interesting," said Cope accommodatingly. He saw no winter shore.
+
+"Yes, February was bad, but Mrs. Phillips wanted to make sure, toward
+the end of the winter, that the house hadn't blown away,--nor the
+contents; for we have housebreakers every so often. And Hortense wanted
+to make some 'color-notes.' I believe she's going to try for some more
+to-day."
+
+"To-day is a good day--unless the October tints are too obvious."
+
+"She says they are not subtle, but that she can use them."
+
+Well, here he was, talking along handily enough. But he had no notion
+of talking for long about Hortense. He preferred returning to the
+weather.
+
+"And what does such a day do for you?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, I suppose it helps me in a general way. But _my_ notes, of course,
+are on paper already."
+
+Yes, he was walking alongside her and holding his own--thus far. She
+seemed a pretty enough, graceful enough little thing; not so tall by an
+inch or so as she appeared when seated behind that samovar. On that day
+she had been reasonably sprightly--toward others, even if not toward
+him. To-day she seemed meditative, rather; even elegiac--unless there
+was a possible sub-acid tang in her reference to Hortense's
+color-notes. Aside from that possibility, there was little indication
+of the "dexterity" which Randolph had asked him to beware.
+
+"On paper already?" he repeated. "But not all of them? I know you
+compose. You are not saying that you are about to give composition up?"
+A forced and awkward "slur," perhaps; but it served.
+
+She gave a little sigh. "Pupils don't want _my_ pieces," she said.
+"Scales; exercises..."
+
+"I know," he returned. "Themes,--clearness, mass, unity.... It's the
+same."
+
+
+They looked at each other and smiled. "We ought not to think of such
+things to-day," she said.
+
+Mrs. Phillips came along, shepherding her little flock for the return.
+"But before we _do_ turn back," she adjured them, "just look at those
+two lovely spreading pines standing together alone on that far hill."
+The small group gazed obediently--though to many of them the prospect
+was a familiar one. Yes, there stood two pines, one just a little
+taller than the other, and just a little inclined across the other's
+top. "A girl out here in August called them Paolo and Francesca. Do you
+think," she asked Cope, "that those names are suitable?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," he replied, looking at the trees thoughtfully.
+"They seem rather--static; and Dante's lovers, if I recollect, had
+considerable drive. They were '_al vento_'--on the wind--weren't they?
+It might be less violent and more modern to call your trees Pelleas and
+Melisande, or--"
+
+"That's it. That's the very thing!" said Medora Phillips heartily.
+"Pelleas and Melisande, of course. That girl had a very ordinary mind."
+
+"I've felt plenty of wind on the dunes, more than once," interjected
+Hortense.
+
+"Or Darby and Joan," Cope continued. "Not that I'm defending that poor
+creature, whoever she was. They seem to be a pretty staid, steady-going
+couple."
+
+"Don't," said Medora. "Too many ideas are worse than too few. They
+confuse one."
+
+And Amy Leffingwell, who had seemed willing to admire him, now looked
+at him with an air of plaintive protest.
+
+"'Darby and Joan'!" muttered Hortense into a sumach bush. "You might as
+well call them Jack and Jill!"
+
+"They're Pelleas and Melisande," declared Mrs. Phillips, in a tone of
+finality. "Thank you so much," she said, with a smile that reinstated
+Cope after a threatened lapse from favor.
+
+
+
+
+11
+
+_COPE ENLIVENS THE COUNTRY_
+
+
+As they drew near the house they heard the tones of a gramophone. This
+instrument rested flatly on a small table and took the place of a
+piano, which would have been a fearful thing to transport from town and
+back. It was jigging away merrily enough, with a quick, regular rhythm
+which suggested a dance-tune; and when the party re-entered the big
+room it was seen that a large corner of the center rug was still turned
+back. Impossible that anybody could have been dancing on the Sabbath;
+surely everybody understood that the evangelical principles of
+Churchton were projected on these occasions to the dunes. Besides, the
+only women left behind had been two in their forties; the men in their
+company were even older. Medora Phillips looked at Randolph, but he was
+staring inexpressively at the opposite wall. She found herself
+wondering if there were times when the mere absence of the young served
+automatically to make the middle-aged more youthful.
+
+"Well, we've had a most lovely walk," she declared. She crossed to the
+far corner of the room, contriving to turn down the rug as she went,
+and opened up a new reservoir of records. She laid them on the table
+rather emphatically, as if to say, "_These_ are suited to the day."
+
+"I hope you're all rested up," she continued, and put one of the new
+records on the machine. The air was from a modern opera, true; but it
+was slow-going and had even been fitted out with "sacred" words.
+Everybody knew it, and presently everybody was humming it.
+
+"It ought not to be hummed," she declared; "it ought to be sung. You
+can sing it, Mr. Cope?"
+
+"Oh yes, indeed," replied Cope, readily enough. "I have the breath
+left, I think,--or I can very soon find it."
+
+"Take a few minutes. I'll fill in with something else."
+
+They listened to an inconclusive thing by a wobbling soprano, and then
+Mrs. Phillips put the other record back.
+
+The accompaniment to the air was rather rich and dense, and the general
+tone-quality was somewhat blatant. But Cope stood up to it all, and had
+the inspiration to treat the new combination as a sort of half-joke.
+But he was relieved from the bother of accompanying himself; his
+resonance overlaid in some measure the cheap quality of the record's
+tone; he contrived to master a degree of momentum to let himself go;
+and the general result was good,--much better than his attempt at that
+tea. Hortense and Carolyn looked at him with a new respect; and Amy,
+who had been willing to admire, now admired openly. Cope ended, gave a
+slight grimace, and sauntered away from the table and the instrument.
+He knew that he had done rather well.
+
+"Bravo!" loudly cried one of the ladies, who felt that she was under
+suspicion of having taken a step or two in the dance. And, "Oh, my
+dear," said Mrs. Phillips to her, sotto voce, "isn't he utterly
+charming!"
+
+Cope wiped his brow. The walk had made him warm, and the singing had
+made him warmer. One or two of the women were using chance pamphlets as
+fans (despite Mrs. Phillips' ill-concealed doubts), and everybody
+showed a willingness to keep in the draught from the open windows.
+
+"Is it close here?" asked the hostess anxiously. "The day is almost
+like summer. If the water is anywhere nearly as warm as the air is....
+Let me see; it's a quarter to four. I have a closetful of bathing
+suits, all sizes and shapes and several colors, if anybody cares to go
+in."
+
+"Don't!" cried Cope explosively.
+
+She looked at him with interest. "Have you been trying it?"
+
+"I have. On the way along the shore. I assure you, however warm the air
+may be, the bathing season is over."
+
+"Well, I rather thought something had been happening to you. Mr.
+Randolph, is it as bad as he says?"
+
+"I'll take his word," replied Randolph. "And I think all of us had
+better do the same."
+
+"We might go down to the beach, anyway," she said. "Hortense wants to
+make her color-notes, and the color will be good from now on."
+
+Several of the party threaded their way down over the sliding sandy
+path which led through the pines and junipers. Cope was willing to go
+with the others--on the present understanding. He objected to
+promiscuous bathing even more strongly than he objected to promiscuous
+dancing.
+
+There were some new cumuli in the east, out above the water, and they
+began to take the late afternoon sun. Hortense cast about for just the
+right point of view, with Carolyn to help on "atmosphere" and two young
+men to be superserviceable over campstool, sketch-block and box of
+colors. She brought back a few dabs which may have served some future
+use;--at all events they served as items in a social record.
+
+Cope and Amy, with some of the others, strolled off in the opposite
+direction. The water remained smooth, and some of the men idly skipped
+stones. One of them dipped in his hand. "Cold?" he exclaimed; "I should
+say!"
+
+Amy looked admiringly at Cope, as one who had braved, beyond season,
+the chill of the great deep, and he tried to reward her with a
+"thought" or two. He had skipped stones himself between dips, and
+Randolph had made a reflection which he could now revise and employ.
+
+"See!" he said, as a flat, waveworn piece of slate left the hand of the
+young business-man and careered over the water; "one, two, three--six,
+eight--ten, thirteen; and then down, down, after all,--down to the
+bottom. And so we end--every one of us. The great thing is to crowd in
+all the action we can before the final plunge comes--to go skipping and
+splashing as hard and long and fast and far as we may!"
+
+A valuable thought, possibly, and elaborated beyond Randolph's sketchy
+and casual utterance; but Amy looked uncomfortable and chilled and
+glanced with little favor at a few other flat stones lying at her feet.
+"Please don't. Please change the subject," she seemed to ask.
+
+She changed it herself. "You sang beautifully," she said, with some
+return of warmth--even with some approach to fervor.
+
+"Oh, I can sing," he returned nonchalantly, "if I can only have my
+hands in my pockets, or waving in the air, or anywhere but on a
+keyboard."
+
+"I wish you had let them persuade you to sing another." She was not
+only willing to admire, but desirous: conscientious amends, perhaps,
+for an earlier verdict. "One or two more skips, you know, after getting
+started."
+
+"Oh, once was enough. A happy coincidence. The next might have been an
+unhappy one."
+
+"You have never learned to accompany yourself?"
+
+"As you've seen, I'm a rather poor hand at it; I've depended a good
+deal on others. Or, better, on another."
+
+She looked at him earnestly. "Have you ever sung to an obbligato?"
+
+"None of my songs, thus far, has called for one. An obbligato? Never so
+much honored. No, indeed. Why, to me it would seem almost like singing
+with an orchestra. Imagine a 'cello. Imagine a flute--still I'm not a
+soprano going mad. Or imagine a saxophone; that might be droll."
+
+He gave out a sort of dragging bleat. She did not smile; perhaps she
+felt such an approach to waggery unworthy of him. Perhaps she was
+holding him up to the dignity of the natural scene, and to the
+importance of the occasion as she conceived it.
+
+Cope had no desire to figure as a comique, and at once regained
+sobriety. "Of course," he admitted, "we are not at a _thé dansant_ or a
+cabaret. Such things ought not to be thought of--here."
+
+She turned her eyes on him again, with a new look of sympathy and
+understanding. Perhaps understanding between them had failed or lapsed
+but a moment before.
+
+"How all of this shames the town!" she said.
+
+"And us--if we misbehave," he added.
+
+Mrs. Phillips came scurrying along, collecting her scattered guests, as
+before. "Tea!" she said. "Tea for one or two who must make an early
+start back to town. Also a sip and a bite for those who stay."
+
+She moved along toward Hortense and her little group. Hortense's
+"color-notes" did not appear to amount to much. Hortense seemed to have
+been "fussed"--either by an excess of company and of help, or by some
+private source of discontent and disequilibrium.
+
+"Come," Mrs. Phillips cried to her, "I need every Martha to lend a
+hand." Hortense rose, and one of her young men picked up her campstool.
+
+"So glad you haven't got to go early," said Mrs. Phillips to Randolph
+and Cope. "In fact, you might stay all night. It will be warm, and
+there are cots and blankets for the porch."
+
+"Thanks, indeed," said Cope. "But I have a class at eight-fifteen
+to-morrow morning, and they'll be waiting to hear about the English
+Novel in the Eighteenth Century, worse luck! Fielding and Richardson
+and--"
+
+"Are you going to explain Pamela and Clarissa to them?" asked Hortense.
+She was abrupt and possibly a bit scornful.
+
+Cope seemed to scent a challenge and accepted it. "I am. The women may
+figure on the covers, but the men play their own strong part through
+the pages."
+
+"I seem to recall," contributed Mrs. Phillips, "that Sir Charles
+Grandison figured both ways."
+
+"That prig!" said Hortense.
+
+"Well, if you can't stay overnight," Mrs. Phillips proceeded, "at least
+stay a few hours for the moonlight. The moon will be almost full
+to-night, and the walk across the marshes to the trolley-line ought to
+be beautiful. Or Peter could run you across in eight or ten minutes."
+
+She did not urge Randolph to remain in the absence of Cope, though
+Randolph's appearance at his office at ten in the morning would have
+surprised no one, and have embarrassed no one.
+
+Tea was served before the big fireplace in which a small flame to heat
+the kettle was rising. Randolph set his empty cup on the shelf above.
+
+"Notice," said Mrs. Phillips to him, "that poem of Carolyn's just
+behind your cup: 'Summer Day in Duneland'." It was a bit of verse in a
+narrow black frame, and the mat was embellished with pen-and-ink
+drawings of the dunes, to the effect of an etching. An etcher, in fact,
+a man famous in his field, had made them, Mrs. Phillips explained.
+
+"And at the other end of the shelf," she advised him, "is a poem in
+free verse, done by a real journalist who was here in June. See:
+'Homage to Dunecrest'--written with a blue pencil on a bit of
+driftwood."
+
+"Sorry _we_ can't leave any souvenir behind," said Cope, who had stolen
+up and was looking at the "poem" over Randolph's shoulder. "But one
+must (first) be clever; and one must (second) know how to put his
+cleverness on record."
+
+"I shall remember _your_ record," she returned with emphasis. Cope
+smiled deprecatingly; but he felt sure that he had sung well.
+
+The moonlight, when it came, was all that Medora Phillips had promised.
+There was another stroll on the beach, with Cope between Medora and
+Carolyn. Then he and Randolph took the causeway across the marsh,
+stopped the trolley by burning a newspaper on the track, and started on
+the long trip home.
+
+As the car ran along jerkily from station to station, the earlier void
+of Duneland became peopled indeed. The extraordinarily mild day had
+drawn out hundreds--had given the moribund summer-excursion season a
+new lease of life. Every stoppage brought so many more young men in
+soiled khaki, with shapeless packs on their backs, and so many more wan
+maidens, no longer young, who were trying, in little bands, to capture
+from Nature the joys thus far denied by domestic life; and at one
+station a belated squad of the "Lovers of Landscape"--some forty or
+fifty in all--came flooding in with the day's spoils: masses of asters
+and goldenrod, with the roots as often as not; festoons of bittersweet,
+and sheaves of sumach and golden glow; and one ardent spirit staggered
+in under the weight of an immense brown paper bag stuffed with prickly
+pear. As the tight-packed company slid along, children drowsed or
+whimpered, short-tempered young men quarreled with the conductor,
+elderly folk sat in squeezed, plaintive resignation.... Soon the lights
+of foundry fires began to show on the sky; then people started dropping
+off in the streets of towns enlivened by the glitter of many saloons
+and an occasional loud glare from the front of a moving-picture
+theater....
+
+Through these many miles Randolph and Cope sat silent: there seemed to
+be a tacit agreement that they need no longer exert themselves to
+entertain each other. Cope reached home shortly before midnight. By
+next morning many of the doings of the previous day had quite passed
+from his mind. Yet a few firm impressions remained. He had had a good
+swim, if but a brief one, with a companion who had been willing, even
+if not bold; he had imposed an acceptable nomenclature upon a somewhat
+anonymous landscape; and, in circumstances slightly absurd, or at least
+unfavorable, he had done his voice and his method high credit in song.
+All else went for next to nothing.
+
+
+
+
+12
+
+_COPE AMIDST CROSS-PURPOSES_
+
+
+Next morning's mail brought Cope a letter from Arthur Lemoyne. The
+letter was short--at least when compared with Cope's own plentiful
+pennings; but it gave our young instructor a few points to think about
+while he was illuminating Clarissa Harlowe and making some careful
+comments on Joseph Andrews. Released toward noon, he read the letter
+over again; and he ran over it again during lunch. Lemoyne possessed a
+variety of gifts, but the gift of letter-writing, in an extended form,
+was not among them. He said all he had to say in four moderate pages.
+
+"Yours received," he wrote. "Am glad the year has opened up so
+interestingly for you. Of course I want to come down as soon as I can,
+_if_ I can, and be with you."
+
+Well, the "if," as the latter part of the letter indicated, was not
+likely to prove insurmountable. The assurance that he wanted to come
+was grateful, though superfluous: who had supposed for a moment that he
+didn't? Still, the thing, put down in plain black and white, had its
+look of comfort.
+
+"Of course the business is not gaining much through my connection with
+it. I expect father begins to see _that_, pretty plainly. As for the
+cathedral choir and the dramatic club and all the rest, I am willing to
+throw them over--expecting that larger interests can be opened to me by
+you."...
+
+Cope paused on these points. He had suggested that Lemoyne enroll as a
+student in some slight course or other, with the hope that his voice
+might lead to his wearing cap and gown at chapel services and that his
+dramatic experience might give him some role in the annual operetta. In
+either of these quarters a good tenor voice was usually to seek. And as
+for the business.... Well, he had once overheard the elder Lemoyne's
+partner audibly wonder whether Arthur would ever learn how to ship a
+keg of nails out of their back door, even.
+
+Cope pushed away his coffee-cup and asked the young Greek for a cut of
+pie.
+
+
+"I sort of sounded father the other day, but he was pretty huffy. I'll
+try again, soon; but I doubt if I can manage to come down until after
+the holidays. You begin a new term, then, I suppose. The fact is, I
+took a week off in the middle of September, and father hasn't forgiven
+it. One of our fellows in the choir had just bought a little roadster,
+and he invited me for a trip to Green Bay and beyond. We dipped along
+through Fish Creek, Ephraim, and so on. Good weather, good roads, good
+scenery, good hotels; and a pleasant time was had by all--or, rather,
+by both."...
+
+Cope dwelt darkly on this passage. Arthur was flighty; Arthur was
+volatile; Arthur was even fickle, when the mood took him. Some
+arrangement that partook more of the hard-and-fast was needed. But
+there was comfort--of a kind--in the next passage.
+
+"Though father, at best, will do very little, and though I have just
+now little enough of my own, there may be somebody or other among your
+faculty or trustees who could find me a niche in the college library or
+in the registrar's office. Or have all such posts been snapped up by
+Johnnys-on-the-spot? A small weekly stipend would rather help our
+_ménage,--hein_?"
+
+This definite inquiry (which carried its own answer) seemed to drive
+one or two brass tacks with some definiteness. Cope himself was eking
+out his small salary with a small allowance from home; next year, with
+the thesis accomplished, better pay in some better place. A present
+partner and pal ought to be a prop rather than a drag: however welcome
+his company, he must bear his share.
+
+"Look about a bit for quarters," Lemoyne went on, drawing toward his
+conclusion. "I presume room-rent is little more for two than for one.
+Possibly," he put down in an afterthought, "I might get a job in the
+city;" and then, "with warm regards," he came to a close as "Art."
+
+Cope finished his lunch and walked out. If Arthur could do one thing
+better than another, it was to make coffee; his product was assuredly
+better than the Greek's. The two had camped out more than once on the
+shores of Lake Winnebago, and Arthur had deftly managed the
+commissariat. They had had good times together and had needed no other
+company. How had it been on Green Bay--at Eagle Cliff and Apron Bluff
+and all the other places lately celebrated in lithographed "folders"
+and lately popularized by motorists? And who was the particular
+"fellow" who ran the roadster?
+
+Late that afternoon Cope chanced upon Randolph among the fantastic
+basins and floral parterres of the court in front of the Botany
+building: Randolph had had a small matter for one of the deans.
+Together they sauntered over to the lake. From the edge of the bluff
+they walked out upon the concrete terrace above the general boiler-room
+and its dynamos. Alongside this, the vast tonnage of coal required for
+the coming winter was beginning to pile up. The weather was still mild
+and sunny and the lake was as valiantly blue as ever.
+
+"It doesn't look like the same body of water, does it?" said Cope.
+
+"It might be just as beautiful in its own way, here, as we found it
+yesterday, out there," returned Randolph. "I've asked my
+brother-in-law, I don't know how many times, why they can't do better
+by this unfortunate campus and bring it all up to a reasonable level of
+seemliness. But----"
+
+"You have a relative among the----?"
+
+"Yes, my sister's husband is one of the University trustees. But he
+lives miles from this spot and hardly ever sees it. Besides, his
+aesthetic endowments are not beyond those of the average university
+trustee. Sometimes they're as hard on Beauty as they are on Free
+Speech."
+
+"I see they're hard on beauty; and I may live to find free speech
+mauled, too."
+
+"Well, you're not in Sociology or Economics. Still, don't trifle with a
+long-established aesthetic idol either. Trustees--and department
+heads--are conservative."
+
+"Oh, you mean about----?"
+
+"About your immortal William. He wrote them. Don't try to rob him.
+Don't try to knock him off his pedestal."
+
+"Oh, you're thinking about my thesis. What I said about Warwickshire
+was just a little flight of fancy, I guess,--a bit of doorstep travel.
+I'm likely enough to stay where I am."
+
+"Well, how about the thesis, really?"
+
+"I think I shall end by digging something out of Here and Now. 'Our
+Middle-West School of Fiction,'--what would you think of that?"
+
+"H'm! If you can make it seem worth while...."
+
+"Well, can't I?"
+
+"Your work, from the very nature of it, must be critical. Now the
+critic, nine times out of ten, takes down a volume from its established
+shelf, dusts it off, ruffles the leaves a bit, and then puts it back
+where it was. The ruffling is sometimes very nice and interesting and
+often gives the ruffler a good position in the glorious company of
+earlier rufflers----"
+
+"I shouldn't be satisfied with anything like that. Things have got to
+move. I want to take some recent, less-known men and put _them_ on the
+shelves."
+
+"Yet you don't want to waste work on material which time may show as of
+transient value, or of none."
+
+"A fellow must chance it. Who gives quickly gives twice;--I suppose
+that applies to praise as well as to money. It irks me to find more
+praise bestowed on the praised-enough,--even on groups of secondary
+importance, sometimes just because they are remote (in England,
+perhaps), and so can be treated with an easy objectivity. To dig in
+your own day and your own community is harder, but I should feel it
+more rewarding."
+
+"But aren't the English books really better? Haven't they more depth,
+substance and background?"
+
+"Possibly,--according to the conventions they themselves have
+established--and according to the society they depict."
+
+"Well, Academe hasn't nailed you yet!"
+
+"No; and I hope it won't. I should like to write a whole book about our
+new men."
+
+"But don't write a thesis and then expect to publish it with profit
+_as_ a book. That's a common enough expectation--or temptation."
+
+They turned away from the lake terrace and the imposing coal-pile.
+Cope, Randolph saw, was in quite a glow; a generous interest had
+touched him, putting fresh light into his eyes and a new vigor into his
+step. He had displayed a charming enthusiasm, and a pure, disinterested
+one. Randolph, under a quiet exterior, was delighted. He liked the boy
+better than ever, and felt more than ever prompted to attach him to
+himself.
+
+"How are you pleased with your present quarters?" he asked, as they
+returned through the Botany court. He thought of the narrow couch, the
+ink-spotted cover on the deal table, the few coats and shoes (they
+_couldn't_ be many) behind that calico curtain.
+
+"None too well," replied Cope. "I shall soon begin to look for another
+room. I rather expect to change about holiday time."
+
+"I am thinking of making a change too," declared Randolph.
+
+"Why, could you better yourself?" asked Cope, in a tone of surprise. "I
+never knew a bachelor to be better fixed."
+
+"I need a little wider margin of room. I can afford it, and ought to
+have had it long ago. And I learn that the lease of the people I'm with
+expires in the spring. My collection is growing; and I ought to have
+another bedroom. Think of not being able to put a man up, on occasion!
+I shall take a small apartment on my own account, catch some Oriental
+who is studying frogs' legs or Occidental theology; and then--open
+house. In a moderate measure, of course."
+
+"That listens good--as the young fellows say," replied Cope. "A not
+uncommon ideal, possibly; but I'm glad that some man, now and then, is
+able to realize it."
+
+"I should hope to see you there," said Randolph intently.
+
+"Thank you, indeed. Yes, while my time lasts. But my own lease is like
+your landlord's--short. Next year,--who knows where?"
+
+"Why not here?"
+
+"Oh!" Cope shrugged, as if conscious of the need of something better,
+and of presently deserving it. "Some big university in the East?"
+wondered Randolph to himself. Well, the transfer, if it came, was still
+a long way ahead.
+
+As he walked home to dinner he entertained himself by imagining his new
+regime. There would be an alert, intelligent Jap, who, in some
+miraculous way, could "do for him" between his studies. There would be
+a cozy dining-room where three or four fellows could have a snug little
+dinner, with plenty of good talk during it and after it. There would
+be, finally, a convenient little spare room, wherein a young knight,
+escaped from some "Belle Dame sans Merci," might lean his sword against
+the wardrobe, prop his greaves along the baseboard, lay his steel
+gauntlets neatly on the top of the dresser, fold his hands over the
+turned-down sheet of a neat three-quarter-width brass bedstead, and
+with a satisfied sigh of utter well-being pass away into sleep. Such
+facilities, even if they scarcely equaled a chateau on the Ridge or a
+villa among the Dunes, might serve.
+
+Cope, on his own way to dinner, indulged in parallel imaginings. He saw
+a larger room than his present, with more furniture and better; a
+bookcase instead of a shelf; a closet, and hot and cold water in some
+convenient alcove; a second table, with a percolator on it, at which
+Arthur, who was a light sleeper and willingly an early riser, might
+indulge his knack for coffee-making to the advantage of them both. And
+Arthur had the same blessed facility with toast.
+
+Then his thoughts made an excursion toward Randolph. Here was a man who
+was in business in the city, and who was related, by marriage, to the
+board of trustees. How soon might one feel sufficiently well acquainted
+with him to ask his friendly offices in behalf of the new-comer,--the
+man who might reasonably be expected the first week in January?
+
+
+
+
+13
+
+_COPE DINES AGAIN--AND STAYS AFTER_
+
+
+Medora Phillips' social activities ran through several social strata
+and her entertainments varied to correspond. Sometimes she contented
+herself with mere boy-and-girl affairs, which were thrown together from
+material gathered within her own household and from the humbler walks
+of undergraduate life. Sometimes she entertained literary celebrities,
+and invited the head professors and their wives to meet them. And two
+or three times a season she gave real dinners to "society," summoning
+to Ashburn avenue, from homes even more architectural than her own, the
+banking and wholesale families whose incomes were derived from the
+city, but who pillared both the university and the many houses of
+worship in Churchton itself. And sometimes, when she passed over the
+older generation of these families in favor of the younger, her courses
+were more "liberal" than Churchton's earlier standards quite approved.
+
+On such formal occasions her three young ladies were dispensed with.
+They were encouraged to go to some sorority gathering or to some
+fudge-party. On the occasion now meditated she had another young person
+in mind. This was the granddaughter of one of the banking families; the
+girl might come along with her father and mother. She was not very
+pretty, not very entertaining; however, Mrs. Phillips needed one girl,
+and if she were not very attractive, none the worse. The one girl was
+for the one young man. The one young man was to be Bertram Cope. Our
+fond lady meant to have him and to show him off, sure that her choicest
+circle could not but find him as charming as she herself did. Most of
+us, at one time or another, have thrust forward our preferences in the
+same confident way.
+
+Cope made less of an impression than his patroness had hoped for.
+Somehow his lithe youthfulness, his fine hair and teeth and eyes, the
+rich resonance of his voice counted for little--except, perhaps, with
+the granddaughter. The middle-aged people about him were used to young
+college men and indifferent to them. Cope himself felt that he was in a
+new environment, and a loftier one. Several of these were important
+people, with names familiar through the town and beyond. He employed a
+caution that almost became inexpressiveness. He also found Mrs.
+Phillips a shade more formal and stately than her wont. She herself, in
+her furtive survey of the board, was disappointed to find that he was
+not telling. "Perhaps it's that girl," she thought; "she may be even
+duller than I supposed." But never mind; all would be made right later.
+Some music had been arranged and there would be an accompanist who
+would help him do himself full justice.
+
+"They'll enjoy him," she thought confidently.
+
+She had provided an immensity of flowers. There was an excess of light,
+both from electric bulbs and from candles. And there was wine.
+
+"I think I can have just one kind, for once," she had said to herself.
+"I know several houses where they have two,--Churchton or not,--and at
+least one where they sometimes have three. If this simple town thinks I
+can put grape-juice and Apollinaris before such people as these...."
+Besides, the interesting Cope might interestingly refuse!
+
+As the many courses moved on, Cope smelt the flowers, which were too
+many, and some of them too odoriferous; he blinked at the lights and
+breathed the heavy thickening air; and he took--interestingly--a few
+sips of burgundy,--for he was now in Rome, and no longer a successful
+Protestant in some lesser town of the empire. He had had a hard, close
+day of it, busy indoors with themes and with general reading; and he
+recalled being glad that the dinner had begun with reasonable
+promptitude,--for he had bothered with no lunch beyond a glass of milk
+and a roll. To-night there had been everything,--even to an unnecessary
+entree. He laid down a spoon on his plate, glad that the frozen
+pudding--of whatever sort--was disposed of. Too much of everything
+after too little. The people opposite were far away; their murmuring
+had become a mumbling, and he wished it was all over. The granddaughter
+at his elbow was less rewarding than ever, less justificatory of the
+effortful small-talk which he had put forth with more and more labor,
+and which he could scarcely put forth now at all. What was it he was
+meaning to do later? To sing? Absurd! Impossible! His head ached; he
+felt faint and dizzy....
+
+"We will leave you gentlemen to your cigars," he heard a distant voice
+saying; and he was conscious for an instant that his hostess was
+looking down the table at him with a face of startled concern....
+
+"Don't try to lead him out," a deep voice said. "Lay him on the floor."
+
+He felt himself lowered; some small rug was doubled and redoubled and
+placed under his head; a large, firm hand was laid to his wrist; and
+something--a napkin dipped in a glass of water and then folded?--was
+put to his forehead.
+
+"His pulse will come up in a minute," he heard the same deep voice say.
+"If he had taken a step he would have fainted altogether."
+
+"My poor, dear boy! Whatever in the world...!" Thus Medora Phillips.
+
+"Better not be moved for a little," was the next pronouncement.
+
+Cope lay there inert, but reasonably conscious of what was going on.
+His eyes gave him no aid, but his ears were open. He heard the alarmed
+voice of Medora Phillips directing the disconcerted maids, and the
+rustle and flutter of the garments of other daughters of Eve, who had
+found him interesting at last. They remarked appreciatively on his
+pallor; and one of them said, next day, before forgetting him
+altogether, that, with his handsome profile (she mentioned especially
+his nose and chin) and with his colorlessness, he looked for a moment
+like an ancient cameo.
+
+He knew, now, that he was not going to faint, and that he was in better
+case than he seemed. In the circumstances he found nothing more
+original to say than: "I shall be all right in no time; just a touch of
+dizziness...." He was glad his dress-coat could stand inspection, and
+hoped nobody would notice that his shoes had been half-soled....
+
+After a little while he was led away to a couch in the library. The
+deep-voiced doctor was on one side of him and Medora Phillips on the
+other. Soon he was left alone to recuperate in the dark,--alone, save
+for one or two brief, fluttery appearances by Mrs. Phillips herself,
+who allowed the coffee to be passed without any supervision on her own
+part.
+
+On the second of these visitations he found voice to say:
+
+"I'm so sorry for this--and so ashamed. I can't think how it could have
+happened."
+
+He _was_ ashamed, of course. He had broken up an entertainment pretty
+completely! Servants running about for him when they had enough to do
+for the company at large! All the smooth conventions of dinner-giving
+violently brushed the wrong way! He had fallen by the roadside, a young
+fellow who had rather prided himself on his health and vigor. Pitiful!
+He was glad to lie in the dark with his eyes shut tight, tight.
+
+If he had been fifteen or twenty years older he might have taken it all
+rather more lightly. Basil Randolph, now----But Randolph had not been
+invited, though his sister and her husband were of the company. Yet had
+it been Randolph, he would have smiled a wan smile and tried for a mild
+joke, conscious that he had made an original and picturesque
+contribution to the affair,--had broken the bland banality of routined
+dinner-giving and had provided woman with a mighty fine chance to
+"minister" and fuss: a thing she rather enjoyed doing, especially if a
+hapless, helpless man had been delivered into her hands as a subject.
+
+But there was no such consolation for poor abashed Cope. He had
+disclosed himself, for some reason or other, a weakling; and he had
+weakened at a conspicuously wrong time and in a conspicuously mistaken
+place. He had hoped, over the cigars and coffee, to lay the foundation
+of an acquaintance with the brother-in-law who was a trustee,--to set
+up an identity in this influential person's mind as a possible help to
+the future of Arthur Lemoyne. But the man now in the dining-room, or
+the drawing-room, or wherever, might as well be in the next state.
+
+There came a slight patter of rain on the bay-window near his head. He
+began to wonder how he was to get home.
+
+Meanwhile, in the drawing-room, among the ladies, Mrs. Phillips was
+anxiously asking: "Was the room too warm? Could the wine have been too
+much for him?" And out in the dining-room itself, one man said, "Heaven
+knows just how they live;" and another, "Or what they eat, or don't
+eat;" and a third, "Or just how hard these young beginners are driven."
+
+"Ought he to go out to-night, Doctor?" asked Mrs. Phillips in a
+whisper, appearing in the dining-room door.
+
+"He might better stay if he can," replied the authority, who happened
+to be at the nearer end of the table.
+
+"Of course he can," she returned. Of course there was a room for him.
+
+When the party finally reassembled in the drawing-room Cope had
+disappeared. Mrs. Phillips could now enlarge on his attractiveness as a
+singer, and could safely assure them--what she herself believed--that
+they had lost a really charming experience. "If you could only have
+heard him that Sunday!" she concluded.
+
+Cope had said, of course, "I can get home perfectly well," and, "It's a
+shame for me to be putting you out this way," and so on and on,--the
+things you yourself would have said in the circumstances; but he said
+them with no particular spirit, and was glad, as he walked uncertainly
+up stairs, that he had not far to go.
+
+Mrs. Phillips indeed "had a room for him." She had rooms a-plenty.
+There was the chintz chamber on the third floor, where the Irish poet
+(who seemed not to expect very much for himself) had been put; and
+there was the larger, handsomer chamber on the second floor, where the
+Hindoo philosopher (who had loomed up big and important through a vague
+Oriental atmosphere) had been installed in state. It was a Louis Quinze
+room, and the bed had a kind of silken canopy and a great deal too much
+in the way of bolsters and lace coverings. It was thought that the
+Hindoo, judging from the report of the maid next morning, had been
+moved by some ascetic impulse to sleep not in the bed but on the floor
+beside it. This was the room now destined for Cope; surely one flight
+of stairs was enough. But there must be no further practice of
+asceticism,--least of all by a man who was really ill; so Mrs.
+Phillips, snatching a moment from her guests, herself saw the maid
+remove the lace pillow-shams and coverlet, and turn down the sheets,
+and set the thermos-bottle on the stand beside the reading lamp....
+
+"Don't get up a moment earlier than you feel like doing," she said, at
+the door. "Breakfast----"
+
+"To-morrow is one of my busy days," replied Cope wanly. "Goldsmith,
+Sheridan...."
+
+"Well, we have other wage-workers in the house, you know. At
+seven-thirty, then, if you must."
+
+"Seven-thirty, if you please. Thank you."
+
+By the time Mrs. Phillips had returned to her guests, the first of the
+limousines was standing before the house; its wet top shone under an
+electric globe. Her own car, meanwhile, obdurately reposed in its
+garage. Presently a second limousine joined the first, and a third the
+second; and in another quarter of an hour her guests were well on their
+way to dispersal. She bade them all goodnight in the best of good humor.
+
+"You've never before had quite such an evening as this, I'm sure!" she
+said, with great gaiety.
+
+"Isn't it wonderful how she took it all!" said one lady to another, on
+the back seat of her car. "Anything like that would have thrown me off
+completely."
+
+The other lady laughed amusedly. She often found our Medora "great fun."
+
+Meanwhile, Cope, up stairs, was sinking deeper and deeper into his big,
+wide, overupholstered bed. And as his body sank, his spirit sank with
+it. He felt poor, unimportant, ill at ease. In especial, he felt
+greatly subordinated; he wished that he might have capitulated to a
+man. Then the mystery of handsome houses and of handsome furnishings
+came to harass him. Such things were everywhere: how were they got, how
+were they kept? Should he himself ever----? But no; nothing ahead for
+years, even in the most favorable of circumstances, save an assistant
+professorship, with its inconceivably modest emoluments....
+
+And Medora Phillips, in the stir of getting her guests out of the
+house, had her first vision of him as sinking off to sleep. Somehow or
+other his fine, straight yellow hair retained its backward sweep with
+no impairment by reason of turnings and tossings; his clear profile
+continued to keep itself disengaged from any depression in the pillows;
+his slender hands were laid in quiet symmetry over the wide edge of the
+down-turned coverlet. A decorous, unperturbed young old-master ... Van
+Eyck ... Carpaccio....
+
+Cope came down to breakfast a little pale, a little shamefaced; but he
+felt pretty well revived and he made up in excess of speech and action
+what he essentially lacked in spirit. Mrs. Phillips descended as early
+as the three girls,--earlier, in fact, than Hortense, who entered
+informally through the butler's pantry and apparently in full
+possession of last night's facts. Carolyn inquired civilly after his
+condition; Amy Leffingwell, with her blue eyes intent upon him,
+expressed concern and sympathy; Hortense, with her lips closely shut in
+a satirical smile, said nothing at all: a possible exhibition of
+self-control which gave her aunt some measure of solicitude. It was not
+always well when she talked, and it was not always well when she kept
+silent. Mrs. Phillips pressed the toast upon him and recommended the
+grape-fruit. He took both with satisfaction, and a second cup of
+coffee. With that he felt he could easily walk to his class-room; and
+the walk itself, in the fresh morning air, would brace him further for
+his hours of routine with his students.
+
+"What a regular nuisance I've made of myself!" he said, on leaving the
+house.
+
+"Oh, haven't you, just!" exclaimed Mrs. Phillips joyously. "Your name
+as an entertainer will be all over town! I'm sure you gave some of
+those poky people a real touch of novelty!"
+
+Amy Leffingwell was in the front hall at the same time, with her
+music-roll. They were going the same way, to substantially the same
+place, to meet about the same hour in the day's schedule. They went
+along the street together.
+
+The morning air was brisk and cool after last night's shower. Like the
+trees under which they passed, it gave the first decided intimation of
+autumn. They set off at a lively pace toward the college towers and the
+lake.
+
+Cope was soon sailing along with his head high, his trim square
+shoulders much in action, and his feet throwing themselves spiritedly
+here and there. Amy, who was not very tall, kept up as well as she
+could.
+
+"This isn't too fast for you...?" she asked presently.
+
+"No; but it may be a little too fast for you. Excuse me; I've never
+learned to keep pace with a woman. But as for myself, I never felt
+better in my life. Every yard toward the good old lake"--the wind was
+coming down from the north in a great sweep--"makes me feel finer."
+
+He slowed up appreciably.
+
+"Oh, not for me!" she said in deprecation. "I like a brisk morning walk
+as well as anybody. Did you sing at all?" she asked.
+
+"Not a note. They put the soft pedal on me. They 'muted' me," he
+amended, in deference to her own branch of the profession.
+
+"We came in by the side door about half past nine. It was a dull
+meeting. I listened for you. Somebody was playing."
+
+Cope gave a sly smile.
+
+"It must have been the poor disappointed woman who was to have
+accompanied me. She had had a list of three or four of my things--to
+run them over in her own album, I suppose. Think just how disappointed
+she must have been to find that she had the whole field to herself!"
+
+"Oh, musicians--even we poor, despised professionals--are not all like
+that. If it had been arranged for me to accompany you with an
+obbligato, I shouldn't have been pleased if opportunity had failed me."
+
+"Your contribution would have been more important than hers. And your
+substitution for my failure would have given added interest."
+
+The talk, having reached the zone of arid compliment, tended to
+languish. They had now reached Learning's side of the trolley-tracks,
+and rills in the great morning flood of the scholastic life were
+beginning to gather about them and to unite in a rolling stream which
+flowed toward the campus.
+
+
+Two or three streets on, the pair separated, she to her work, he to
+his. For him the walk had been a nothing in particular--he would a
+little have preferred taking it alone. For her it had been--despite the
+low level of expressiveness reached on either side--a privilege which
+had been curtailed much too soon.
+
+Meanwhile, back in the house, Hortense was detailing the events of the
+previous evening to Joe Foster; the general access of activity on the
+morning after had made it desirable that she help with his breakfast.
+
+She went at it with a will.
+
+"Why," she said, as Foster sat at his coffee, boiled egg and toast, "he
+keeled over like a baby."
+
+"Hum!" said Foster darkly. It was as if a shaping ideal had dissipated.
+Or as if a trace of weakness in one seemingly so young and strong was
+not altogether unacceptable as a source of consolation.
+
+However, Cope, at half past four that afternoon, was on the faculty
+tennis-courts, with a racquet in his hand. But one set was enough. "I
+seem to be a day ahead of my schedule," he said, pulling out and
+strolling along homeward.
+
+
+
+
+14
+
+_COPE MAKES AN EVASION_
+
+
+Two or three days later, Randolph put a book of essays in his pocket
+and went round to spend an hour with Joseph Foster. Foster sat in his
+wheeled chair in his own room. He was knitting. The past year or two
+had brought knitting-needles into countenance for men, and he saw no
+reason why he should not put a few hanks of yarn into shape useful for
+himself. He might not have full command of his limbs nor of his eyes,
+but he did have full command of his fingers. He had begun to knit socks
+for his own use; and even a muffler, in the hope that on some occasion,
+during the coming months, he might get outside.
+
+As Randolph entered, Foster looked up from under his green shade with
+an expression of perplexity. "Have I dropped a stitch here or not?" he
+asked. "I wish you knew something about knitting; I don't like to call
+Medora or one of the girls away up here to straighten me out. Look;
+what do you think?"
+
+"They count all right," said Randolph; and he sat down on the couch
+opposite. "I've brought a book."
+
+"I hope it's poetry!" said Foster, with a fierce promptness. "I hope
+it's about Adonis, or Thammuz, whose mishap 'in Lebanon' set all the
+Syrian females a-going. I could stand a lot more of that,--or perhaps I
+couldn't!"
+
+
+"Why, Joe, what's gone wrong?"
+
+"I suppose you know that your young friend got up a great to-do for us
+the other evening?"
+
+"Yes; I've heard something about it." He looked at Foster's drawn face,
+and heard with surprise the rasping note in his voice. "Was it as bad
+as that?"
+
+
+Foster drew his shade down farther over his eyes and clashed his
+needles together.
+
+"I remember how, when I was in Florence, we went out to a religious
+festival one evening at some small hill-town near by. This was twenty
+years ago, when I _could_ travel. There was a kind of grotto in the
+church, under the high altar; and in the grotto was a full-sized figure
+of a dead man, carved and painted--and covered with wounds; and round
+that figure half the women and girls of the town were collected,
+stroking, kissing ... Adonis all over again!"
+
+"Oh, come, Joe; don't get morbid."
+
+Foster lifted one shoulder.
+
+"Well, the young fellow began by roaring through the house like a bull
+of Bashan, and he ended by toppling over like a little wobbly calf."
+
+He spoke like a man who had imagined a full measure of physical powers
+and had envied them ... had been exasperated by the exuberant
+presentation of them... had felt a series of contradictory emotions
+when they had seemed to fail....
+
+"It was only a moment of dizziness," said Randolph. "I imagine he was
+fairly himself next day."
+
+"Well, I've heard too much about it. Medora came up here and----"
+
+"Need we go into that?"
+
+"There were plenty more to help," Foster went on doggedly. "One dear
+creature, who was old enough to be more cautious, spilt water down the
+whole front of her dress----"
+
+"I expect," said Randolph, "that the poor chap has been overworked; or
+careless about his meals; or worried in his classes--for he may not be
+fully settled in his new place; or some emotional strain may have set
+itself up----"
+
+"I vote for the emotional strain," said Foster bluntly.
+
+"A guess in the dark," commented Randolph, and paused. He himself knew
+little enough of Cope as a complex. He had met him but a few times, and
+could not associate him with his unknown background. He knew next to
+nothing of Cope's family, his connections, his intimates, his early
+associations and experiences. Nor had he greatly bestirred himself to
+learn. He had done little more than go to a library in the city and
+turn over the leaves of the Freeford directory. This publication, like
+most of those dealing with the smaller cities, gave separately the
+names of all the members of a family; and repetitions of the same
+address helped toward the arrangement of these individuals (disposed
+alphabetically) into family groups. Freeford had no great number of
+Copes, and several of them lived at 1636 Cedar Street. "Elm, Pine,
+Locust, Cedar," had thought Randolph; "the regular set." And, "One of
+the good streets," he surmised, "but rather far out. Cedar!" he
+repeated, and thought of Lebanon and the Miltonic Adonis. Of these
+various Copes, "Cope, David L., bookpr," might be the father,--unless
+"Cope, Leverett C., mgr" were the right man. If the former, he was
+employed by the Martin & Graves Furniture Company, and the Martins were
+probably important people who lived far out--and handsomely, one might
+guess--on a Prospect Avenue.... Then there was "Cope, Miss Rosalys M.,
+schooltchr," same address as "David": she was likely his daughter.
+"H'm!" Randolph had thought, "these pickings are scanty,--enough
+anatomical reconstruction for to-day...." And now he was thinking, as
+he sat opposite Foster, "If I had only picked up another bone or two, I
+might really have put together the domestic organism. Yet why should I
+trouble? It would all be plain, humdrum prose, no doubt. Glamour
+doesn't spread indefinitely. And then--men's brothers...."
+
+"Well," asked Foster sharply, "are you mooning? Medora sat in the same
+place yesterday, and she talked for awhile too and then fell into a
+moonstruck silence. What's it all about?"
+
+Randolph came out of his reverie. "Oh, I was just hoping the poor boy
+was back on his pins all right again."
+
+Then he dropped back into thought. He was devising an outing designed
+to restore Cope to condition. If Cope could arrange for a free
+Saturday, they might contrive a week-end from Friday afternoon to
+Monday morning. It was too late for the north and too late for the
+opposite Michigan shore; but there was "down state" itself, where the
+days grew warmer and the autumn younger the farther south one went.
+There was a trip down a certain historic river,--historic, as our
+rivers went, and admirably scenic always. He recalled an exceptional
+hotel on one of its best reaches; one overrun in midsummer, but
+doubtless quiet at this season. It stood in the midst of some striking
+cliffs and gorges; and possibly one of the little river-steamers was in
+commission, or could be induced to run....
+
+Foster dropped his muffler pettishly. "Read,--if you won't talk!"
+
+"I can talk all right," returned Randolph. "In fact, I have a bit of
+news for you."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"I'm going to move."
+
+Foster peered out from under his shade.
+
+"Move? What for? I thought you were all right where you are.
+
+"All right enough; except that I want more room--and a house of my own."
+
+"Have you found one?"
+
+"I've about decided on an apartment. And I expect to move into it early
+next month."
+
+"Top floor, of course?"
+
+"No; first floor, not six feet above the street level."
+
+"Good. If they'll lend me a hand here, to get down and out, I'll come
+and see you, now and then."
+
+"Do so."
+
+"That will give me a chance to wear this muffler, after all."
+
+"So it will."
+
+"Well, be a little more cordial. You expect to see your friends, don't
+you?"
+
+"Of course. That's what it's for. Have I got to exert myself," he
+added, "to be cordial with _you_?"
+
+"What's the neighborhood?"
+
+"Oh, this one, substantially. The next street from where I am now."
+
+"Housekeeper?"
+
+"I think I'll have a Jap alone, at first."
+
+"Dinners?"
+
+"A few small try-outs, perhaps."
+
+"Mixed parties?"
+
+"Not at the beginning, anyhow."
+
+"Oh; bachelor's hall."
+
+"About that."
+
+Foster readjusted his shade, and drove his needles into his ball of
+yarn.
+
+"Complete new outfit?"
+
+"Well, I have some things in storage."
+
+"How about the people you're with now?"
+
+"Their lease is up in the spring. They may go on; they may not. Fall's
+the time to change."
+
+Foster drew out his needles again and fell to work.
+
+"You ought to have seen Hortense the next morning. She put my tray on
+the table, and then went down in a heap on the floor--or it sounded
+like that. She was fainting away at dinner, she said."
+
+"She found it amusing?"
+
+"I don't know _how_ she found it," returned Foster shortly. "If ever
+_I_ do anything like that at your house, run me home."
+
+"Not if it's raining. I shall be able to tuck you away somewhere."
+
+"Don't. I never asked to be a centre of interest."
+
+"Well," returned Randolph merely, and fell silent.
+
+Foster resumed work with some excess of vigor, and presently got into a
+snarl. "Dammit!" he exclaimed, "have I dropped another?"
+
+Randolph leaned over to examine the work. "Something's wrong."
+
+"Well, let it go. Enough for now. Read."
+
+There followed a half hour of historical essay, during which Foster a
+few times surreptitiously fingered his needles and yarn.
+
+"Shall you have a reading-circle at your new diggings?" he asked after
+a while.
+
+"If two can be said to make a circle,--and if you will really come."
+
+"I'm coming. But I never understood that only two points could
+establish a circle. Three, anyway."
+
+"Circle!" exclaimed Randolph. "Don't worry the word to death."
+
+He went away presently, and as he walked his thoughts returned to
+Indian Rock. The excursion seemed a valid undertaking at an
+advantageous time; and he could easily spare a couple of days from the
+formation of his new establishment. He called on Cope that evening.
+Cope felt sure he could clear things for Saturday, and expressed
+pleasure at the general prospect. He happened to be writing to Lemoyne
+that evening and passed along his pleasure at the prospect to his
+friend. A few jaunts, outings or interludes of that kind, together with
+his week at his home in Freeford, over Christmas, would agreeably help
+fill in the time before Arthur's own arrival in January.
+
+Randolph received Cope's response with gratification; it was pleasant
+to feel oneself acceptable to a younger man. In the intervals between
+his early looking at rugs and napery he collected timetables and
+folders, made inquiries, and had some correspondence with the manager
+of the admirable hotel. He had a fondness for well-kept hostelries just
+before or just after the active season. It was a pleasure to breakfast
+or dine in some far corner of a large and almost empty dining-room. It
+would be a pleasure to stroll through those gorges, which would be
+reasonably certain to be free from litter, and to perch on the crags,
+which would be reasonably certain to be free from picnic parties. It
+would be agreeable also to sleep in a chamber far from town noises and
+grimes, with few honks from late excursionists and but little early
+morning clatter from a diminished staff. And the river boats were still
+running on Sunday.
+
+"It will brace him for the rest of his fall term," thought Randolph,
+"and me for my confounded shopping. And during some one of our
+boat-rides or rambles, I shall tell him of my plans for the winter."
+
+The departure, it was agreed upon, should take place late on Friday
+afternoon. On Friday, at half past eleven, Randolph, at his office in
+the city, received a long-distance call from Churchton. Cope announced,
+with a breathless particularity not altogether disassociated from
+self-conscious gaucherie, that he should be unable to go. Some
+unexpected work had been suddenly thrown upon him.... He rather thought
+that one or two of his family might be coming to town for over
+Sunday....
+
+The telephone, as a conveyor of unwelcome message, strikes a medium
+between the letter by mail and the face-to-face interview. If it does
+not quite give chance for the studied guardedness and calculated
+plausibility of the one, it at least obviates some of the risk involved
+in personal presence and in the introduction of contradictory evidence
+often contributed by manner and by facial expression. And a long
+distance interview must be brief,--at least there can be no surprise,
+no indignation, if it is made so.
+
+"Very well," said Randolph, in reply to Cope's hurried and indistinct
+words. "I'm sorry," he added, and the brief talk was over. "You are
+feeling all right, I hope," he would have added, as the result of an
+afterthought; but the connection was broken.
+
+Randolph left the instrument. He felt dashed, a good deal disappointed,
+and a little hurt. He took two or three folders from a pigeon-hole and
+dropped them into a waste-basket. Well, the boy doubtless had his
+reasons. But a single good one, frankly put forth, would have been
+better than duplicate or multiple reasons. He hoped that, on Sunday, a
+cold drizzle rather than a flood of sunlight might fall upon the autumn
+foliage of Indian Rock. And he would turn to-morrow to good account by
+looking, for an hour or two, at china.
+
+Sunday afternoon was gorgeously bright and autumnal in Churchton,
+whatever it may have been along the middle reaches of the Illinois
+river; and at about four o'clock Randolph found himself in front of
+Medora Phillips' house. Medora and her young ladies were out strolling,
+as was inevitable on such a day; but in her library he found Foster
+lying on a couch--the same piece of furniture which, at a critical
+juncture, had comforted Cope.
+
+"Peter brought me down," said the cripple. "I thought I'd rather look
+at the backs of books than at the fronts of all those tedious pictures.
+Besides, I'm beginning to practice for my call at your new quarters."
+Then, with a sudden afterthought: "Why, I understood you were going
+somewhere out of town. What prevented?"
+
+"Well, I changed my plans. I needed a little more time for my
+house-furnishing. I was looking yesterday at some table-ware for your
+use; am wondering, in fact, if Mrs. Phillips couldn't arrange to give
+me the benefit of her taste to-morrow or Tuesday...."
+
+"She likes to shop," replied Foster, "and taste is her strong suit.
+I'll speak to her,--she's gone off to some meeting or other. Isn't this
+just the afternoon to be spending indoors?" he commented brusquely.
+"What a day it would be for the country," he added, sending his
+ineffectual glance in the direction of Randolph's face.
+
+"We Churchtonians must take what we can get," Randolph replied, with an
+attempt at indifference. "Our _rus in urbs_ isn't everything, but there
+are times when it must be made to serve."
+
+Foster said nothing. Silent conjecture, seemingly, was offered him as
+his part.
+
+
+
+
+15
+
+_COPE ENTERTAINS SEVERAL LADIES_
+
+
+Cope's excuse, involving the expected visit of a relative, may not have
+been altogether sincere, but it received, within a week or so, the
+substantial backing of actuality: a relative came. She was an
+aunt,--his father's sister,--and she came at the suggestion of a
+concerned landlady. This person, made anxious by a languid young man
+who had begged off from his classes and who was likely to need more
+attention than her scanty margin of leisure could grant, had even
+suggested a hospital while yet it was easy for him to reach one. Though
+Cope meant to leave her soon, it did not suit him to leave her quite as
+soon as this; and so Aunt Harriet came in from Freeford to look the
+situation over and to lend a hand if need be. She spent two nights in a
+vacant chamber at transient rates; was grudgingly allowed to prepare
+his "slops," as he called them, in the kitchen; and had time to satisfy
+herself that, after all, nothing very serious was the matter.
+
+Randolph did not meet this relative, but he heard about her; and her
+coming, as a sort of family representative, helped him still further in
+his picture of the _res angusta_ of a small-town household: a father
+held closely to office or warehouse--his own or some one else's; a
+sister confined to her school-room; a mother who found the demands of
+the domestic routine too exacting even to allow a three-hour trip to
+town; and a brother--Randolph added this figure quite gratuitously out
+of an active imagination and a determined desire not to put any of the
+circle to the test of a personal encounter--and a brother who was
+perhaps off somewhere "on the road."
+
+The one who met Aunt Harriet was Medora Phillips, and the meeting was
+brief. Medora had heard from Amy Leffingwell of Cope's absence from his
+class-room. She herself became concerned; she felt more or less
+responsible and possibly a bit conscience-stricken. "Next time," she
+said, "I shall try to have the ventilation right; and I think that,
+after this, I shall keep to birch beer."
+
+Medora called up Amy at the music-school, one afternoon, at about four.
+She assumed that the day's work was over, told Amy she was "going
+around" to see Bertram Cope, and asked her to go with her. "You may act
+as my chaperon," she said; "for who knows where or how I shall find
+him?"
+
+As they neared the house a colored man came out, carrying a small trunk
+to a mud-bespattered surrey. "What! is he going?" said Medora, with a
+start. "Well, anyway, we're in time to say good-bye." Then, "What's the
+matter, Jasper?" she asked, having now recognized the driver and his
+conveyance.
+
+"Got a lady who's gettin' away on the four forty-three."
+
+"Oh!" said Medora, with a gasp of reassurance.
+
+Cope's aunt said good-bye to him up stairs and was now putting on her
+gloves in the lower hall, in the company of the landlady. Medora
+appraised the visitor as a semi-rustic person--one of some substance
+and standing in her own community; marriage, perhaps, had provided her
+with means and leisure. She had been willing to subordinate herself to
+a university town apprehended as a social organism, and she now seemed
+inclined to accept with docility any observations made by a confident
+urbanite with a fair degree of verve.
+
+"These young men," said Medora dashingly, "are too careless and proud."
+
+"Proud?" asked the other. She felt clearly enough that her nephew had
+been careless; but pride is not often acknowledged among the members of
+an ordinary domestic circle.
+
+"They're all mind," Medora went on, with no lapse of momentum. She knew
+she must work in brief, broad effects: the surrey was waiting and the
+train would not delay. "They sometimes forget that their intellectual
+efforts must rest, after all, on a good sensible physical basis. They
+mustn't scorn the body."
+
+The departing visitor gave a quick little sigh of relief. The views of
+this fashionable and forthputting woman were in accord with her own,
+after all.
+
+"Well, I've told Bert," she said, buttoning her second glove, "that he
+had better take all his meals in one place and at regular hours. I've
+told him his health is of just as much account as his students and
+their studies." She seemed gratified that, on an important point, she
+had reached unanimity with an influential person who was to remain
+behind; and she got away without too long delaying the muddy surrey and
+the ungroomed sorrel.
+
+Medora Phillips looked after her with a grimace. "Think of calling him
+'Bert'!"
+
+Cope, when advised, came down in a sort of bathrobe which he made do
+duty as a dressing-gown. He took the stairs in a rapid run, produced an
+emphatic smile for the parlor threshold, and put a good measure of
+energy into his handshakes. "Mighty good of you to call," he said to
+Mrs. Phillips. "Mighty good of you to call," he said to Amy Leffingwell.
+
+Well, he was on his feet, then. No chance to feel anxiously the brow of
+a poor boy in bed, or to ask if the window was right or if he wouldn't
+like a sip of water. Life's little disappointments...!
+
+To Amy Leffingwell he seemed pale, and she felt him as glad to sit down
+at once in the third and last chair the little room offered. She
+noticed, too, an inkstain on his right forefinger and judged that the
+daily grind of theme-correction was going on in spite of everything.
+
+"Did you meet my aunt before she got away?" he asked.
+
+"We did," said Medora, "and we are going to add our advice to hers."
+
+"That's very nice of you," he rejoined, flattered. "But within a couple
+of months," he went on, with a lowered voice and an eye on the parlor
+door, "I shall be living in a different place and in quite a different
+way. Until then...." He shrugged. His shrug was meant to include the
+scanty, unpretending furnishings of the room, and also the rough casual
+fare provided by many houses of entertainment out of present sight.
+
+"I almost feel like taking you in myself," declared Medora boldly.
+
+"That's still nicer of you," he said very promptly and with a
+reinforcement of his smile. "But I'm on the up-grade, and pretty soon
+everything will come out as smooth as silk. I shall have ten days at
+home, for the holidays; then, after that, the new dispensation."
+
+Amy Leffingwell tempered her look of general commiseration with a
+slight lapse into relief. There was no compelling reason why she should
+have commiserated; perhaps it all came from a desire to indulge in an
+abandonment to gentleness and pity.
+
+"Do you know," said Cope, with a sort of embarrassed laugh, "I feel as
+if I were letting myself become the focus of interest. Oughtn't I to do
+something to make the talk less personal?"
+
+He glanced about the meagre little room. It gave no cue.
+
+"I'm sure Amy and I are satisfied with the present subject," returned
+Medora.
+
+But Cope rose, and gathered his bathrobe--or dressing-gown--about him.
+"Wait a moment. I have some photographs I can show you--several of them
+came only yesterday. I'll bring them down."
+
+As soon as he had disappeared into the hall, Mrs. Phillips gave a
+slight smile and said quickly:
+
+"For heaven's sake, Amy, don't look so concerned, and mournful, and
+sympathetic! Anybody might think that, instead of your being my
+chaperon, I was yours!"
+
+"He doesn't look at all well," said Amy defensively.
+
+"He might look better; but we can't pity a young man too openly. Pity
+is akin to embarrassment, for the pitied."
+
+Cope came down stairs the second time at a lesser pace. He carried a
+sheaf of photographs. Some were large and were regularly mounted;
+others were but the informal products of snap-shottery.
+
+He drew up his chair nearer to theirs and began to spread his pictures
+over the gray and brown pattern on his lap.
+
+"You know I was teaching, last year, at Winnebago," he said. "Here are
+some pictures of the place. Science Hall," he began, passing them.
+"Those fellows on the front steps must be a graduating class.
+
+"The Cathedral," he continued. "And I think that, somewhere or other, I
+have a group-picture of the choir.
+
+"Sisterhood house," he went on. "Two or three of them standing out in
+front."
+
+"Sisterhood?" asked Mrs. Phillips, with interest. "What do they do?"
+
+Cope paused. "What do they do, indeed? Well, for one thing, they
+decorate the altar--Easter, Harvest home, and so on."
+
+"That isn't much. That doesn't take a house."
+
+"Well, I suppose they visit, and teach. Sort of neighborhood centre.
+Headquarters. Most of them, I believe, live at home."
+
+"Dear me! Is Winnebago large enough to require settlement-work?"
+
+"Don't drive me so! I suppose they want to tone in with the cathedral
+as a special institution. 'Atmosphere,' you know. Some tracts of our
+great land are rather drab and vacant, remember. Color, stir,--and
+distinction, you understand."
+
+"Is Winnebago ritualistic?"
+
+"Not very. While I was there a young 'priest,' an offshoot from the
+cathedral, started up a new parish in one of the industrial outskirts.
+He was quite earnest and eloquent and put up a fine service; but nobody
+except his own father and mother went to hear him preach."
+
+Mrs. Phillips returned to the Sisterhood house.
+
+"Are they nice girls?" she asked acutely.
+
+"Oh, I guess so. I met two or three of them. Nice girls, yes; just
+trying to be a little different. Here's the boat-house, and some of the
+fellows in their rowing-clothes. Some sail-boats too."
+
+"Can you sail?" asked Amy. She had the cathedral-choir in one hand and
+now took the boat-club in the other. She studied both pictures
+intently, for both were small and crowded.
+
+"Why, I have all the theory and some of the practice. Those small
+inland lakes are tricky, though."
+
+"Probably no worse than ours," said Mrs. Phillips. "Do help poor Amy,"
+she went on. "_Are_ you in either of these groups?"
+
+"No. Didn't I tell you I was trying to get away from the personal? I'm
+not in any of these pictures." Amy unconsciously let both half-drop, as
+if they held no particular interest, after all. And the hand into which
+the next photograph was put gave it but lukewarm welcome.
+
+Mixed in with these general subjects were several of a more personal
+nature: groups of twos and threes, and a number of single figures. One
+face and figure, as Mrs. Phillips presently came to notice, occurred
+again and again, in various attitudes and costumes. It was a young man
+of Cope's own age--or perhaps two or three years older. He was of
+Cope's own height, but slightly heavier, with a possible tendency to
+plumpness. The best of the photographs made him dark, with black, wavy
+hair; and in some cases (where sunlight did not distort his expression)
+he indulged a determined sort of smile. He figured once, all by
+himself, in choir vestments; again, all by himself, in rowing toggery;
+a third time, still by himself, in a costume whose vague inaccuracy
+suggested a character in amateur theatricals.
+
+"Who is this?" inquired Mrs. Phillips, with the last of these in hand.
+
+Cope was prompt, but vague.
+
+"Oh, that's a chum of mine, up there. He belongs to a dramatic club.
+They give 'The School for Scandal' and 'Caste,' and--well, more modern
+things. They have to wear all sorts of togs."
+
+"And here he is again? And here? And here?"--shuffling still another
+picture into view.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"He's fond of costume, isn't he?"
+
+"Very versatile," returned Cope, lightly and briefly. "Clothes to
+correspond."
+
+Mrs. Phillips began to peer again at the picture of the choir-group.
+"Isn't he here too?"
+
+"Yes. With the first tenors. There you have him,--third from the left,
+just behind that row of little devils in surplices."
+
+"You and he sing together?"
+
+"Sometimes--when we _are_ together."
+
+"'Larboard Watch' and 'Suona la Tromba' and----?"
+
+"Oh, heavens!" said Cope. He threw up his head quite spiritedly. There
+was now more color in his cheeks, more sparkle in his eyes, more
+vibration in his voice. Amy looked at him with a vanishing pity and a
+growing admiration.
+
+"Let us fellows be of our own day and generation," he added.
+
+"Willingly," said Mrs. Phillips. "But my husband was fond of 'Larboard
+Watch'; I heard him sing in it before we were married. Shall I ever
+hear you sing together?" she asked.
+
+"Possibly. He is coming down here early in January. To look after me."
+
+"After you?" Mrs. Phillips reviewed the photographs once more. "I
+imagine you may sometimes have to look after him."
+
+Cope sobered a little. "Sometimes," he acknowledged. "We shall look
+after each other," he amended. "We are going to live together."
+
+"Oh, then, he is coming to _stay_? You've been a long time in reaching
+the point. And why do you say 'possibly' when I ask about your singing
+together? Aren't you coming to my house 'together'?"
+
+"I withdraw the 'possibly.' Probably."
+
+"And now withdraw the 'probably.' Make it 'certainly.'"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"'Certainly,'--of course."
+
+"That's better," murmured her companion.
+
+Then Mrs. Phillips must know the new-comer's name, and must have an
+outline of the proposed plan. And Amy Leffingwell began to look with
+renewed interest on the counterfeit form and features of the young man
+who enjoyed Bertram Cope's friendly regard. And so the moments of
+"entertainment"--Cope's in turn--went on.
+
+"I'm glad he really appears to like _somebody_," declared Mrs.
+Phillips, on the way home; "it makes him seem quite human." Inwardly,
+she was resolving to have both the young men to dine at the earliest
+possible date. It was not always practicable to invite a single young
+man as often as you wished. Having two to ask simplified the problem
+considerably.
+
+Cope, flushed and now rather tired, walked up stairs with his
+photographs, took a perfunctory sip from a medicine-glass, looked at
+the inkstain on his finger, and sat down at his table. Two or three
+sheets of a letter were lying on it, and he re-read a paragraph or so
+before dipping his pen.
+
+"You were rather exacting about that week-end excursion. Mr. R. was all
+right, and a few days of new air and new scenes would have done me a
+lot of good. Still, I acknowledge your first claim. But remember that I
+gave up Indian Rock for you, even if you didn't give up Green Bay for
+me. I hope the fellow who took you hasn't got anything further to
+propose. If he has, I ask for a tip in turn.
+
+"Naturally it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to explain to him,
+and I haven't seen him since. But I can truly say that a relative _did_
+come, and that she was needed--or thought she was."
+
+He picked up his pen for a fresh paragraph.
+
+"The new photos--added to those I had--have come in quite nicely. They
+have just helped me entertain a couple of callers. Women have abounded
+in these parts to-day: Mrs. Peck, scurrying about more than usual; an
+aunt from home, getting away with her baggage--more than she needed to
+bring; and then the two who have just gone. It all makes me feel like
+wanting to take part in a track-meet or a ball-game--though, as I am
+now, I might not last two minutes at either. The lady who called was
+Mrs. Phillips. I thought she might as well know that you were coming.
+Of course you are already invited, good and plenty, to her house. Look
+in old music-books and see if you can't find 'Larboard Watch.' If it
+turns out you can get away _before_ the holidays, come down and go out
+with me to Freeford for Christmas. I have had some rather glum hours
+and miss you more than ever. I have been within arm's length of one of
+the University trustees (who can probably place me _now_!)--but I don't
+know just how much that can be counted upon for, if for anything. Show
+yourself,--that will help.
+
+"B."
+
+
+
+
+16
+
+_COPE GOES A-SAILING_
+
+
+Cope was himself in a few days. He set aside his aunt's counsel in
+regard to a better regimen, as well as her more specific hints,
+made in view of the near approach of rough weather, that he provide
+himself with rubbers and an umbrella, even if he would not hear of a
+rain-coat. "Am I made of money?" he asked. He gave a like treatment
+to some intimations contributed by Medora Phillips during her call:
+he met them with the smiling, polite, half-weary patience which a man
+sometimes employs to inform a woman that she doesn't quite know what
+she is talking about. He was presently in as active circulation, on
+the campus and elsewhere, as ever. The few who looked after him at all
+came to the view that he possessed more mettle than stamina. He had no
+special fondness for athletics; he was doing little to keep--still less
+to increase--a young man's natural endowment of strength and vigor.
+Occasional tennis on the faculty courts, and not much else.
+
+So the vast gymnasium went for little with him, and the wide football
+field for less, and the great lake, close by, for nothing. This last,
+however, counted for little more with any one else. Those who knew the
+lake best were best content to leave it alone. As a source of pleasure
+it had too many perils: "treacherous" was the common word. Its
+treachery was reserved, of course, for the smiling period of summer;
+especially did the great monster lie in wait on summer's Sunday
+afternoons. Then the sun would shine on its vast placid bosom and the
+breeze play gently, tempting the swimmer toward its borders and the
+light pleasure craft toward its depths. And then, in mid-afternoon, a
+sudden disastrous change; a quick gale from the north, with a wide
+whipping-up of white caps; and the morrow's newspapers told of bathers
+drowned in the undertow, of frail canoes dashed to pieces against piers
+and breakwaters, and of gay, beflagged steam-launches swamped by the
+newly-risen sea miles from shore: the toll of fickle, superheated
+August. But in the late autumn the immense, savage creature was more
+frankly itself: rude, blustery, tyrannical,--no more a smiling, cruel
+hypocrite. It warned you, often and openly, if warning you would take.
+
+It was on the last Sunday afternoon in October that Cope and Amy
+Leffingwell were strolling along its edge. They had met casually, in
+front of the chapel, after a lecture--or a service--by an eminent
+ethical teacher from abroad,--a bird of passage who must pipe on this
+Sunday afternoon if he were to pipe at all. Cope, who had lain abed
+late, made this address a substitute for the forenoon service he had
+missed. And Amy Leffingwell had gone out somewhat for the sake,
+perhaps, of walking by the house where Cope lived.
+
+They passed the Science building, with its tower crowned by an
+ornamental open-work iron pyramid for wireless, and the segregated
+group of theological dormitories through whose windows earnest ringing
+young voices were sometimes heard at the practice of sermon-delivery,
+and the men's club where the billiard tables were doubtless decorously
+covered with their customary Sunday sheets of black oilcloth, and took
+intuitively the path which led along the edge of the bluff. Beyond
+them, further bluffs and a few low headlands; here a lighthouse, there
+a water-tower; elsewhere (and not so far) the balconied roof of the
+life-saving station, where the boats, light and heavy, were manned by
+muscular students: their vigilance and activity, interspersed with long
+periods of leisure or of absence, helped them to "pay their way." Out
+toward the horizon a passenger steamer en route to some port farther
+north, or a long ore-freighter, singularly uneventful between bow and
+far-distant afterhouse, on its way down from the iron-ranges of
+Superior.
+
+The path was narrow, but Cope, unexpectedly to himself, had no
+complaint to make. Really, the girl did better here, somehow, than lots
+of other girls would have done on a wide sidewalk. Most of them walked
+too close to you, or too far from you, altering the interval suddenly
+and arbitrarily, and tending to bump against you when you didn't expect
+it and didn't want it. They were uncertain at crossings; if it was
+necessary for them to take your arm, as it sometimes became, in the
+evening, on a crowded street, why, they were too gingerly or else
+pressed too close; and if it happened to rain, you sometimes had to
+take a cab, trafficking with a driver whose tariff and whose
+disposition you did not know: in fact, a string of minor embarrassments
+and expenses....
+
+But the way, this afternoon, was clear and easy; and there were no
+annoyances save from other walkers along the same path. The sun shone
+brightly at intervals. A fresh breeze swept the wide expanse streaked
+with purple and green and turned an occasional broken wave-crest toward
+the western light. Some large cumuli were abroad--white, or less white,
+or even darkling,--the first windy sky of autumn.
+
+Cope and Amy passed the life-saving station, where a few people sat
+about idly and where one or two visitors pressed noses against glass
+panes to view the boats within; and they reached presently a sort of
+little public park which lay along the water. Here a small pier ran out
+past the shallows, and in front of a shack close by it a man sat
+resignedly near a group of beached and upturned row-boats. One or two
+others were still in the water, as was a small sloop. The fellow sat
+there without expectations: the season was about over; the day was none
+too promising for such as knew. His attitude expressed, in fact, the
+accumulated disappointment and resignation of many months. Perhaps he
+was a new-comer from the interior--some region of ponds and rivers--and
+had kept through an uneventful summer the notion that so big a spread
+of water would surely be put to use. The sail of the sloop,
+half-lowered, flapped in the breeze, and little else stirred.
+
+Our young people overlooked both man and boat.
+
+"It's the same lake," said Amy Leffingwell, rather dreamily, after a
+common silence of several minutes.
+
+"The same," returned Cope promptly. "It's just what it was a year ago,
+a century ago; and a millennium ago, I suppose,--if there was anyone
+here to notice."
+
+She turned on him a rueful, half-protesting smile. "I wasn't thinking
+of a century ago. I was thinking of a month ago."
+
+"A month ago?"
+
+"Yes; when we were walking along the dunes."
+
+"Oh, I see. Why, yes, it is the same old lake, though it seems hard to
+realize it. Foreground makes so much difference; and so does--well,
+population. I mean the human element, or the absence of it."
+
+Amy pondered.
+
+"The one drawback, there, was that we couldn't go out on the water."
+
+"Go out? I should say not. No pier for miles, and the water so shallow
+that hardly more than a canoe could land. Still, those fishermen out
+there manage it. But plain summerites, especially if not dressed for
+it, would have an unpleasant time imitating them."
+
+Amy cast her eye about. Here was a shore, a pier, a boat, a man to let
+it....
+
+"Would you like to go out?" asked the man himself perfunctorily, as
+from the depths of a settled despair. He pointed a thumb over his
+shoulder toward the sloop.
+
+The two young people looked at each other. Neither looked at the sky.
+"Well, I don't know," replied Cope slowly. The sloop was on a pretty
+small scale; still, it was more to manage than a cat-boat.
+
+"You have the theory, you know," said Amy demurely, "and some practice."
+
+Cope looked at her in doubt. "Can you swim?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," she returned. "I have some practice, if not much theory."
+
+"Could you handle a jib?"
+
+"Under direction."
+
+"Well, then, if you really wish ..."
+
+The misanthrope, with a twisted smile, helped them get away. The
+mainsail took a steady set; but the jib, from the first, possessed an
+active life of its own.
+
+"Not that rope," cried Cope; "the other."
+
+"Very well," returned Amy, scrambling across the cockpit. And so it
+went.
+
+In six or eight minutes their small catastrophe overtook them. There
+came a sudden flaw from out one of the racing gray cumuli, and a faint
+cry or two from the distant shore. Theory had not put itself into
+practice as quickly as the emergency required,--all the less so in that
+it had to work through a crew encumbered with a longish skirt and a
+close jacket. The sloop keeled over; Cope was instantly entangled with
+the mainsail and some miscellaneous cordage; and Amy, with the water
+soaking her closely-fitting garments, found herself clutching the
+cockpit's edge.
+
+She saw Cope's predicament and let go her hold to set him free. He
+helped shake himself loose with a loud forced laugh and a toss of the
+head to get his long hair out of his eyes. "We'll leave the wreck," he
+spluttered, "and make for the shore." The shore, fortunately, was
+scarcely more than a hundred yards away,--yet never had the great twin
+towers of the library seemed so distant or the wireless cage on Science
+hall so futile.
+
+They swam, easily, side by side, he supporting her in her cramped
+clothes at the start, and she, a bit concerned, somewhat supporting him
+toward the end. Meanwhile, there was some stir at the life-saving
+station, a quarter of a mile down the shore.
+
+The last hundred feet meant mere wading, though there was some
+variability among the sand ridges of the bottom; but the water, at its
+deepest, never reached their shoulders. Their small accident now began
+to take on the character of a ceremonial--an immersion incident to some
+religious rite or observance; and the little Sunday crowd collecting on
+the water's edge might have been members of some congregation
+sympathetically welcoming a pair of converts to the faith.
+
+"Let's hold our heads high and walk straight," said Cope, his arm in
+hers; "heaven knows whom we are likely to meet. And throw your hat
+away--you'll look better without it. Lord knows where mine is," he
+added, as he ran a smoothing hand over his long locks.
+
+"Very well," she said, casting away her ruined, ridiculous headgear
+with her free arm. The other, in his, was giving more support to him,
+she felt, than he was giving to her.
+
+Just as they were about to reach dry land, amidst the congratulations
+and the amused smiles of the little group at the foot of the bluff, the
+belated crew of life-savers swept up in their smallest boat and
+insisted on capturing them.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Cope," said a familiar voice, "please let us save you. We
+haven't saved a soul for months."
+
+Cope recognized one of his own students and surrendered, though a
+kindly house-owner on the bluff had been quick to cry across the
+intervening yards of water his offer of hospitality. "All right," he
+said; "take us back to your place, where we can dry and telephone." He
+hoped, too, that they might have to encounter fewer people at the other
+spot than at this.
+
+Meanwhile, another boat belonging to the station had set out to aid the
+owner of the sloop in its recovery. It was soon righted and was brought
+in. There was no damage done, and there was no charge that Cope could
+not meet, as he learned next day to his great relief.
+
+The station gave him a dry outfit of clothes, assembled from here and
+there, and telephoned to Mrs. Phillips to bring fresh garments for Amy.
+Neither had time to get a chill. A pair of kindly servant-maids, who
+were loitering on the shore with their young men, insisted on carrying
+the heroine of the afternoon into retirement, where they expeditiously
+undressed her, rubbed her, and wrapped her in a quilt snatched from a
+life-saving bed. Amy was cold indeed, and inclined to shiver. She
+understood, now, why Cope had not encouraged that bathing party at the
+dunes.
+
+In a few minutes Medora Phillips tore up in her car, with Helga and a
+mountain of clothing and wraps. She was inclined to make the most of
+the occasion, and she did so. With Helga she quickly superseded the
+pair of sympathetic and ready maids, whom she allowed to fade into the
+background with too scant recognition of their services; and when she
+had got Amy thoroughly warmed and rehabilitated she turned her thought
+toward Cope. Here, certainly, was a young scholastic recluse who had an
+admirable faculty for getting into the public eye. If one section of
+Churchton society had talked about his performance at her dinner, all
+sections of it would now be discussing his new performance on the high
+seas. Suddenly she was struck with the notion that possibly his first
+lapse had not left him in condition to stand this second one.
+
+"How are you feeling?" she asked anxiously. "No chill? No shock?"
+
+"I'm all right," he declared. "One of the boys has just given me a
+drink of--of----" But it was a beverage the use of which was not
+generally approved in Churchton.
+
+Mrs. Phillips turned round suddenly. "Amy, did you have a drink, too,
+of--of--of--if 'Of' is what you call it?"
+
+"I did," said Amy firmly; "and I feel the better for it."
+
+"Well, get in, then, and I'll take you home."
+
+Peter grinned from the front seat of the car; Mrs. Phillips placed
+herself between the two victims on the back one; the life-savers, who
+had kept the discarded garments to dry, gave them all a few smiles and
+hand wavings; the two young women and their two young men looked on
+with some deference; the general crowd gave a little mock-cheer before
+turning its Sunday leisure to other forms of interest; and the small
+party whirled away.
+
+Amy leaned a tired, moist head, but a happy one, on Mrs. Phillips'
+shoulder. "He was so quick," she breathed, "and so brave, and so
+strong." She professed to believe that he had saved her life. Cope,
+silent as he looked straight ahead between Peter and Helga, was almost
+afraid that she had saved his.
+
+
+
+
+17
+
+_COPE AMONG CROSS-CURRENTS_
+
+
+Next morning, at breakfast, Amy Leffingwell kept, for the most part, a
+rapt and meditative eye on her plate. Hortense gave her now and then an
+impatient, half-angry glare, and had to be cut short in some stinging
+observations on Cope. "But it _was_ foolish," Medora Phillips felt
+obliged to concede. "What in the world made you do it?"
+
+But Amy continued to smile at the table-cloth. She seemed to be
+intimating that there was a special folly which transcended mere
+general folly and approximated wisdom.
+
+After breakfast she spoke a few words to Carolyn. She had had all night
+to think the matter over; she now saw it from a new angle and in a new
+light.
+
+"You should have seen how he shook himself free from that sail, and
+all," she said. "And while we were swimming in he held his hand under
+my chin--at least part of the time. And when we reached the sandbars he
+put his arm through mine and helped me over every one." And in this
+state of mind she went off to her class.
+
+Cope was received by his own class with a subdued hilarity. His young
+people felt that he had shown poor judgment in going out on the water
+at all,--for the University, by tacit consent, left the lake pretty
+well alone. They thought that, once out, he had shown remarkably inept
+seamanship. And they thought that he had chosen a too near and too
+well-lighted stage for the exhibition of both. This forenoon the
+"Eighteenth Century Novelists" involved Smollett, and with every
+reference to the water looks of understanding traveled from student to
+student: that the class was of both sexes made the situation no better.
+Cope was in good enough physical condition,--the unspeakable draught
+from the unspeakable flask had ensured that,--but he felt what was in
+the air of the classroom and was correspondingly ill at ease.
+
+He had had, for several days, an understanding with Basil Randolph that
+they were to go together to the next weekly reception of the
+president's wife. Randolph wished to push Cope's fortunes wherever he
+might, and to make him stand out from the general ranks of the young
+instructors. He had the entrée to the Thursdays at the president's
+house, and he wanted Cope to meet personally and intimately, under the
+guidance he could provide, a few of the academic dignitaries and some
+of the wealthier and more prominent townspeople. Notwithstanding Mrs.
+Phillips' confident impression, Cope's exploit at her own table had
+gained no wide currency. The people she had entertained were people who
+expected and commanded a succession of daily impressions from one
+quarter or another. With them, a few light words on Cope's achievement
+were sufficient; they walked straight on toward the sensation the next
+day was sure to bring. But of course the whole University knew about
+his second performance. Some of its members had witnessed it, and all
+of them had read about it, next day, in Churchton's four-page "Index."
+
+The president's wife was a sprightly lady, who believed in keeping up
+the social end of things. Her Thursdays offered coffee and chocolate at
+a handsomely appointed table, and a little dancing, now and then, for
+the livelier of the young professors and the daughters of the town's
+best-known families; above all, she insisted on "receiving"--even on
+having a "receiving line." She would summon, for example, the wife of
+one of the most eminent members of the faculty and the obliging spouse
+of some educationally-minded banker or manufacturer; and she herself
+always stood, of course, at the head of her line. When Cope came along
+with Randolph, she intercepted the flow of material for her several
+assistants farther on, and carried congestion and impatience into the
+waiting queue behind by detaining him and "having it out."
+
+She caught his hand with a good, firm, nervous grasp, and flashed on
+him a broad, meaningful smile.
+
+"Which saved which?" she asked heartily.
+
+Mrs. Ryder, who was farther along in the line, but not too far, beamed
+delightedly, yet without the slightest trace of malice. An eminent
+visiting educator, five or six steps behind our hero, frowned in
+question and had to have the situation explained by the lady in his
+company.
+
+Cope, a trifle embarrassed, and half-inclined to wish he had not come,
+did what he could to deprive the episode of both hero and heroine. It
+was about an even thing, he guessed,--a matter of cooperation.
+
+"Isn't that delightful!" exclaimed the president's wife to the wife of
+the banker, before passing Cope on. "And so modern! Equality of the
+sexes.... Woman doing her share, et cetera! For this," she presently
+said to the impatient educator from outside, "are we co-educational!"
+And, "Good teamwork!" she contrived to call after Cope, who was now
+disappearing in the crowd.
+
+Cope lost himself from Randolph, and presently got away without seeing
+who was pouring coffee or who was the lightest on foot among the
+younger professors. The president's wife had asked him, besides, how
+the young lady had got through it, and had even inquired after her
+present condition. Well, Amy Leffingwell was enrolled among the
+University instructors, and doubtless the wife of the institution's
+head had been well within her rights,--even duly mindful of the
+proprieties. But "The Index"! That sheet, staid and proper enough on
+most occasions, had seemed, on this one, to couple their names quite
+unwarrantably. "Couple!" Cope repeated the word, and felt an injury. If
+he had known that Amy had carefully cut out and preserved the offending
+paragraph, his thought would have taken on a new and more disquieting
+tone.
+
+In the inquiry of the president's wife about the condition of his
+copartner in adventure he found a second source of dissatisfaction. He
+had not called up to ask after Amy; but Mrs. Phillips, with a great
+show of solicitude, had called up early on Monday morning to ask after
+him. He had then, in turn, made a counter-inquiry, of course; but he
+could take no credit for initiative. Neither had he yet called at the
+house; nor did he feel greatly prompted to do so. That must doubtless
+be done; but he might wait until the first fresh impact of the event
+should somewhat have lost its force.
+
+Mrs. Phillips' voice had kept, over the telephone, all its vibratory
+quality; its tones expressed the most palpitating interest. It was
+already clear--and it became even clearer when he finally called at the
+house--that she was poetizing him into a hero, and that she regarded
+Amy herself as but a means, an instrument. At this, Cope felt a little
+more mortified than before. He knew that he had done poorly in the
+boat, and he was not sure that, in the first moment of the upset, he
+should have freed himself unaided; and he confessed that he had not
+been quite in condition to do very well on the way landward. However,
+all passed.... Within a fortnight or less the incident would have
+dropped back into its proper perspective, and his students would have
+found some other matter for entertainment. In the circumstances he
+grasped at the first source of consolation that came. Randolph was now
+installed in his new apartment and felt that, though not fully settled,
+he might risk asking Cope to dinner. "You are the first," Randolph had
+said. Cope could not escape the flattery; it was almost comfort.
+
+His prompt acceptance was most welcome to Randolph. Cope had dwelt, for
+a moment, on the actual presence of Aunt Harriet and on his need of
+her. Randolph had made no precise study of recent chronology, taking
+the reason given over the wire as a valid one and feeling glad that
+there was no hitch this time.
+
+Randolph gave Cope a rapid view of the apartment before they sat down
+to dinner. There were fewer pictures on the newly-papered walls than
+there were to be, and fewer rugs on the freshly-varnished floors. "My
+standing lamp will be in that corner," said Randolph, in the
+living-room, "--when it comes." He drew attention to a second bedroom
+where a man could be put up on occasion: "you, for example, if you ever
+find yourself shut out late." He saw Sir Galahad's gauntlets on the
+dresser. He even gave Cope a glimpse of his kitchen, where a
+self-contained Oriental, slightly smiling but otherwise inexpressive,
+seemed to be dealing competently with the gas-range. But Cope was
+impressed, most of all, by the dining-room table and its paraphernalia.
+At Mrs. Phillips' he had accepted the china, silver and napery as a
+matter of course--an elaborate entity quite outside his own thoughts
+and calculations: it was all so immensely far beyond his reach and his
+needs. Randolph, however, had dealt as a bachelor with a problem which
+he himself as a bachelor must soon take up, on however different a
+scale and plane. For everything here was rich and handsome; he should
+not know how to select such things--still less how to pay for them. He
+felt dashed; he felt depressed; once more the wonder of people's
+"having things." He sipped his soup in the spirit of humility, and did
+not quite recover with the chops.
+
+Randolph made little talk; he was glad merely to have Cope there. He
+indulged no slightest reference to the accident; he assumed, willingly
+enough, that Cope had done well in a sudden emergency, but did not care
+to dwell on his judgment at the beginning. Still, a young man was
+properly enough experimental, venturesome...
+
+Cope had recovered himself by the time dessert was reached. He
+accomplished an adjustment to his environment, and Randolph was glad to
+feel his unaffected response to good food properly cooked and served.
+"He sha'n't gipsy _all_ the time," Randolph said to himself. "I shall
+try to have him here at least twice a week." Once in a while the
+evening might be stormy, and then the gauntlets would be laid on the
+dresser--perhaps after an informal smoke in pajamas among the curios
+ranged round the small den.
+
+Cope set down his demi-tasse with a slight sigh. "Well," he said, "I
+suppose that, before long, I shall have to buy a few sticks of
+furniture myself and a trifle of 'crockery.' And a percolator."
+Randolph looked across at him in surprise.
+
+"You are moving, then,--you too?" Not to greatly better quarters, he
+almost hoped.
+
+"Yes; and we shall need a few small things by way of outfit."
+
+"We." Randolph looked more intently. Housekeeping _à deux_? A
+roommate? Matrimony? Here was the intrusion of another piece on the
+board--a piece new and unexpected. Would it turn out to be an added
+interest for himself, or a plain source of disconcertment? Cope,
+having unconsciously set the ball rolling, gave it further impetus.
+He sketched his absent friend and told of their plans for the winter
+and spring terms. "I shall try for a large easy chair," he concluded,
+"unless Arthur can be induced to bring one with him."
+
+Randolph, by this time, had led Cope into the den, established him
+between padded arms, and given him a cigar. He drew Cope's attention to
+the jades and swordguards, to the odd assortment of primitive musical
+instruments (which would doubtless, in time, find a place at the Art
+Museum in the city), and to his latest acquisition--a volume of Bembo's
+"Le Prose." It had reached him but a week before from Venice,--"_in
+Venetia, al segno del Pozzo_, MDLVII," said the title-page, in fact. It
+was bound in vellum, pierced by bookworms, and was decorated, in quaint
+seventeenth-century penmanship, with marginal annotations, and also, on
+the fly leaves, with repeated honorifics due to a study of the forms of
+address by some young aspirant for favor. Randolph had rather depended
+on it to take Cope's interest; but now the little _envoi_ from the
+Lagoons seemed lesser in its lustre. Cope indeed took the volume with
+docility and looked at its classical title-page and at its quaint
+Biblical colophon; but, "Just who _was_ 'Pietro Bembo'?" he asked; and
+Randolph realized, with a slight shock, that young instructors teach
+only what they themselves lately have learned, and that, in many cases,
+they have not learned much.
+
+But in truth neither paid much heed to the tabulated vocables of the
+Venetian cardinal--nor to any of the other rarities near by. Basil
+Randolph was wondering how he was to take Arthur Lemoyne, and was
+asking himself if his trouble in setting up a new ménage was likely to
+go for nothing; and Bertram Cope, while he pursued the course of the
+bookworm through the parchment covers and the yellowed sheets within,
+was wondering in what definite way his host might aid the fortunes of
+Arthur Lemoyne and thus make matters a little easier for them both.
+"_All' ill.'mo Sig.'r paron ossevnd.'mo.... All' ill.'mo et ecc.'mo
+Sig.'r paron... All' ill'mo et R.R.d.'mo Sig.'r, Sig.'r Pio. Francesco
+Bembo, Vesco et Conte di Belluno_"--thus ran the faded brown lines on
+the flyleaf, in their solicitous currying of favor; but these
+reiterated forms of address conveyed no meaning to Cope, and offered no
+opening: now, as once before, he let the matter wait.
+
+Randolph thought over Cope's statement of his plans, and his slight
+touch of pique did not pass away. Toward the end of the evening, he
+spoke of the wreck and the rescue, after all.
+
+"Well," he said, "you are not so completely committed as I feared."
+
+"Committed?"
+
+"By your new household arrangements."
+
+"Well, I shall have back my chum."
+
+Randolph put forward the alternative.
+
+"I was afraid, for a moment, that you might be taking a wife."
+
+"A wife?"
+
+"Yes. Such a rescue often leads straight to matrimony--in the
+story-books, anyhow."
+
+Cope laughed, but with a slight disrelish. "We're in actual life still,
+I'm glad to think. What I said on one stretch of the shore goes on the
+other," he declared. "I don't feel any more inclination to wedded life
+than ever, nor any likelihood"--here he spoke with effort, as if
+conscious of a possible danger on some remote horizon--"of entering it."
+
+"It _would_ have been sudden, wouldn't it?" commented Randolph, with a
+short laugh. "Well," he went on, "one who inclines to hospitality must
+work with the material at his disposal. I shall be glad, on some
+occasion or other," he proceeded, with a slight trace of formality
+creeping into his tone, "to entertain your friend."
+
+"I shall be more than glad," replied Cope, "to have you meet."
+
+
+
+18
+
+
+_COPE AT THE CALL OF DUTY_
+
+Cope took his own time in calling upon the Ashburn Avenue circle; but
+he finally made, in person, the inquiries for which those made by
+telephone were an inadequate substitute. Yet he waited so long that,
+only a few hours before the time he had set, he received a sweet but
+somewhat urgent little note from Amy Leffingwell suggesting his early
+appearance. He felt obliged to employ the first moments of his call in
+explaining that he had been upon the point of coming, anyway, and that
+he had set aside the present hour two or three days before for this
+particular purpose: an explanation, he acknowledged inwardly, which
+held no great advantage for him.
+
+"Why am I spinning such stuff?" he asked himself impatiently.
+
+Amy's note of course minimized her aid to him and magnified his aid to
+her. All this was in accord with established form, but it was in still
+stronger accord with her determination to idealize his share in the
+incident. His arm _had_ grasped hers firmly--and she felt it yet. But
+when she went on to say--not for the first time, nor for the
+second--how kind and sympathetic he had been in supporting her chin
+against those slapping waves when the shore had seemed so far away, he
+wondered whether he had really done so. For a moment or two, possibly;
+but surely not as part of a conscious, reasoned scheme to save.
+
+"She was doing all right enough," he muttered in frowning protest.
+
+Neither did he welcome Mrs. Phillips' tendency to make him a hero. She
+was as willing as the girl herself to believe that he had kept Amy's
+chin above water--not for a moment merely, but through most of the
+transit to shore. He sat there uneasily, pressing his thumbs between
+his palms and his closed fingers and drawing up his feet crampingly
+within their shoes; yet it somewhat eased his tension to find that
+Medora Phillips was disposed to put Amy into a subordinate place: Amy
+had been but a means to an end--her prime merit consisted in having
+given him a chance to function. Any other girl would have done as well.
+A slight relief, but a welcome.
+
+Another mitigation: the house, the room, was full of people. The other
+young women of the household were present; even the young business-man
+who had understood the stove and the pump had looked in: no chance for
+an intense, segregated appreciation. There had been another weekend at
+the dunes, when this youth had nimbly ranged the forest and the beach
+to find wood for the great open fireplace; and he had come, now, at the
+end of the season, to make due acknowledgments for privileges enjoyed.
+He, for his part, was willing enough to regard Amy as a heroine; but he
+considered her as a heroine linked with the wrong man and operative in
+the wrong place. He cared nothing in the world for Cope, and disparaged
+him as before--when he did not ignore him altogether. If Amy had but
+been rescued by him, George F. Pearson, instead of by this Bertram
+Cope, and if she had been snatched from a disorderly set of breakers at
+the foot of those disheveled sandhills instead of from the prim, prosy,
+domestic edge of Churchton--well, wouldn't the affair have been better
+set and better carried off? In such case it might have been picturesque
+and heroic, instead of slightly silly.
+
+Yes, the room was full. Even Joseph Foster had contrived to get himself
+brought down by Peter: further practice for the day when he should make
+a still more ambitious flight and dine at Randolph's new table. He sat
+in a dark corner of the room and tried to get, as best he might, the
+essential hang of the situation: the soft, insidious insistence of Amy;
+the momentum and bravado of his sister-in-law; the veiled disparagement
+of Cope in which George F. Pearson, seated on a sofa between Carolyn
+and Hortense, indulged for their benefit, or for his own relief; above
+all, he listened for tones and undertones from Cope himself. He had
+never seen Cope before (if indeed it could be said that he really saw
+him now), and he had never heard his speaking voice save at a remove of
+two floors. Cope had taken his hand vigorously, as that of the only man
+(among many women) from whom he had much to expect, and had given him a
+dozen words in a loud tone which seemed to correspond with his
+pressure. But Cope's voice, in his hearing, had lapsed from resonance
+to non-resonance, and from that to tonelessness, and from that to
+quietude.... Was the fellow in process of making a long diminuendo--a
+possible matter of weeks or of months? As before, when confronted by
+what had once seemed a paragon of dash and vigor, he scarcely knew
+whether to be exasperated or appeased.
+
+Through this variety of spoken words and unspoken thoughts Hortense sat
+silent and watchful. Presently the talk lapsed: with the best will in
+the world a small knot of people cannot go on elaborately embroidering
+upon a trivial incident forever. There was a shifting of groups, a
+change in subjects. Yet Hortense continued to glower and to meditate.
+What had the incident really amounted to? What did the man himself
+really amount to? She soon found herself at his side, behind the
+library-table and its spreading lamp-shade. He was silently handling a
+paper-cutter, with his eyes cast down.
+
+"See me!" she said, in a tense, vibratory tone. "Speak to me!"--and she
+glowered upon him. "I am no kitten, like Amy. I am no tame tabby, like
+Carolyn, sending out written invitations. Throw a few poor words my
+way."
+
+Cope dropped the paper-cutter. Her address was like a dash of brine in
+the face, and he welcomed it.
+
+"Tell me; did you look absurd--then?" she dashed ahead.
+
+A return to fresh water, after all! "Why," he rejoined reluctantly, "no
+man, dressed in all his clothes, looks any the better for being soaked
+through."
+
+"And Amy,--she must have looked absolutely ridiculous! That wide,
+flapping hat, and all! I had been telling her for weeks that it was out
+of style."
+
+"She threw it away," said Cope shortly. "And I suppose her hair looked
+as well as a woman's ever does, when she's in the water."
+
+"Well," she observed, "it's one thing to be ridiculous and another to
+go on being ridiculous. I hope you don't mean to do that?"
+
+The pronoun "you" has its equivocal aspects. Her expression, while
+marked enough, threw no clear light. Cope took the entire onus on
+himself.
+
+"Of course no man would choose to be ridiculous--still less to stay so.
+Do, please, let me keep on dry land; I'm beginning to feel
+water-logged." He shifted his ground. "Why do you try to make it seem
+that I don't care to talk with you?"
+
+"Because you don't. Haven't I noticed it?"
+
+"I haven't. It seems to me that I----"
+
+"Of course you haven't. Does that make it any better?"
+
+"I'm sure the last thing in the world I should want to do would be
+to----"
+
+"I know. Would be to show partiality. To fail in treating all alike.
+Even that small programme isn't much--nor likely to please any girl;
+but you have failed to carry it out, small as it is. Here in this
+house, there on the dunes, what have I been--and where? Put into any
+obscure corner, lost in the woods, left off somewhere on the edge of
+things...."
+
+Cope stared and tried to stem her protests. She was of the blood,--her
+aunt's own niece. But whereas Medora Phillips sometimes "scrapped," as
+he called it, merely to promote social diversion and to keep the
+conversational ball a-rolling, this young person, a more vigorous
+organism, and with decided, even exaggerated ideas as to her dues...
+Well, the room was still full, and he was glad enough of it.
+
+"I don't know whether I like you or not," she went on, in a low, rapid
+tone; "and I don't suppose you very much like me; but I won't go on
+being ignored....
+
+"Ignored? Why," stammered Cope, "my sense of obligation to this
+house----"
+
+She shrugged scornfully. His sense of obligation had been made none too
+apparent. Certainly it had not been brought into line with her deserts
+and demands.
+
+Cope took up the paper-cutter again and looked out across the room. Amy
+Leffingwell, questioningly, was looking across at him. He could change
+feet--if that made the general discomfort of his position any less. He
+did so.
+
+Amy was standing near the piano and held a sheet or two of new music in
+her hands. And Medora Phillips, with a word of general explication and
+direction, made the girl's intention clear. Amy had a new song for
+baritone, with a violin obbligato and the usual piano accompaniment,
+and Cope was to sing it. 'Twas an extremely simple thing, quite within
+his compass; and Carolyn, who could read easy music at sight ("It's
+awfully easy," declared Amy), would play the piano part; and Amy
+herself would perform the obbligato (with no statement as to whether it
+was simple or not).
+
+Carolyn approached the task and the piano in the passive spirit of
+accommodation. Cope came forward with reluctance: this was not an
+evening when he felt like singing; besides, he preferred to choose his
+own songs. Also, he would have preferred to warm up on something
+familiar. Amy took her instrument from its case with a suppressed sense
+of ecstasy; and it is the ecstatic who generally sets the pace.
+
+The thing went none too well. Amy was the only one who had seen the
+music before, and she was the only one who particularly wanted to make
+music now. However, the immediate need was not that the song should go
+well, but that it should go: that it should go on, that it should go on
+and on, repetitiously, until it should come (or even not come) to go
+better. She slid her bow across the strings with tasteful passion. She
+enjoyed still more than her own tones the tones of Cope's voice,--tones
+which, whether in happy unison with hers or not, were, after all,
+seldom misplaced, whatever they may have lacked in heartiness and
+confidence. It was a short piece, and on the third time it went rather
+well.
+
+"How perfectly lovely!" exclaimed Mrs. Phillips, at the right moment.
+
+Cope smiled deprecatingly. "It might be made to go very nicely," he
+said.
+
+"It _has_ gone very nicely," insisted Amy; "it did, this last time."
+She waved her bow with some vivacity. She had heaved the whole of her
+young self into the work; she had been buoyed up by Cope's tones,
+which, with repetition, had gathered assurance if not expressiveness;
+and she based her estimate of the general effect on the impression
+which her own inner nature had experienced. And her impression was
+heightened when Pearson, forging forward, and ignoring both Cope and
+Carolyn, thanked her richly and emphatically for her part--a part
+which, to him, seemed the whole.
+
+Hortense, who had kept her place behind the large lampshade, twisted
+her interlocked fingers and said no word. Foster, who had disposed
+himself on an inconspicuous couch, kept his own counsel. After all,
+_omne ignotum_: Cope's singing had sounded better from upstairs. At
+close range a ringing assertiveness had somehow failed.
+
+Cope had come with no desire to extend his stay beyond the limits of an
+evening call. He declined to sing on his own account, and soon rose as
+if to make his general adieux.
+
+"You won't give us one of your own songs, then?" asked Medora Phillips,
+in a disappointed tone. "And at my dinner----"
+
+No, she could not quite say that, at her dinner, Cope, whatever he had
+failed to do, had contributed no measure of entertainment for her
+guests.
+
+"Give us a recitation, then," persisted Medora; "or tell us a story. Or
+make up"--here she indulged herself in an airily imperious flight--"a
+story of your own on the spot."
+
+A trifling request, truly. But----
+
+"Heavens!" said Cope. "I am not an author--still less an
+_improvvisatore_."
+
+"I am sure you could be," returned Medora fondly. "Just try."
+
+Cope sat down again and began to run his eye uncomfortably about the
+room, as if dredging the air for an idea. Behind one corner of a mirror
+was a large bunch of drying leaves. They had been brought in from the
+sand dunes as a decorative souvenir of the autumn, and had kept their
+place through mere inertia: an oak bough, once crimson and russet; a
+convoluted length of bittersweet, to which a few split berries still
+clung; and a branch of sassafras, with its intriguing variety of
+leaves--a branch selected, in fact, because it gave, within narrow
+compass, the plant's entire scope and repertoire as to foliage.
+
+Cope caught at the sassafras as a falling balloonist catches at his
+parachute.
+
+"Well," he said, still reluctant and fumbling, "perhaps I can devise a
+legend: the Legend, let us say, of the Sassafras Bush."
+
+"Good!" cried Medora heartily.
+
+Pearson, whispering to Amy Leffingwell, gave little heed to Cope and
+his strained endeavor to please Mrs. Phillips. Foster, quite passive,
+listened with curiosity for what might come.
+
+"Or perhaps you would prefer folk-lore," Cope went on. "Why the
+Sassafras has Three Kinds of Leaves, or something like that."
+
+"Better yet!" exclaimed Medora. "Listen, everybody. Why the Sassafras
+has Three Kinds of Leaves."
+
+Pearson stopped his buzzings, and Cope began. "The Wood-nymphs," he
+said slowly, "were a nice enough lot of girls, but they labored under
+one great disadvantage: they had no thumbs."
+
+Hortense pricked up her ears. Did he mean to be personal? If so, he
+should find that one of the nymphs had a whole hand as surely as he
+himself had a cheek.
+
+Cope paused. "Of course you've got to postulate _something_," he
+submitted apologetically.
+
+"Of course," Medora agreed.
+
+"So when they bought their gloves, or mittens, or whatever their
+handgear might be called, they usually patronized the hickory or the
+beech or some other tree with leaves that were----"
+
+"Ovate!" cried Medora delightedly.
+
+"Ovate, yes; or whatever just the right word may be. But a good many of
+them traded at the Sign of the Sassafras, where they found leaves that
+were similar, but rather more delicate."
+
+"I believe he's going to do it," thought Foster.
+
+"Yet the nymphs knew that they lacked thumbs and kept on wanting them.
+So, during the long, dull winter, they put their minds to it, and
+finally thumbs came."
+
+"Will-power!" said Medora.
+
+"And early in April they went to the Sassafras and said: 'We have
+thumbs! We have thumbs! So we need a different sort of mitten.'
+
+"The Sassafras was only half awake. 'Thumbs?' he repeated. 'How many?'
+
+"'Two!' cried the nymphs. 'Two!'
+
+"A passing breeze roused the Sassafras. He became at least
+three-quarters awake."
+
+"I doubt it," muttered Hortense.
+
+"'That's interesting,' he said. 'I aim to supply all new needs. Come
+back in a month or so, and meanwhile I'll see what I can do for you.'
+
+"In May the nymphs returned with their thumbs and asked, 'How about our
+new mittens?'"
+
+The story was really under way now, and Cope went on with more
+confidence and with greater animation.
+
+"'Look and see,' said the Sassafras.
+
+"They looked and saw. Among its simple ordinary leaves were several
+with two lobes--one on each side. 'Will these do?'
+
+"'Do?' said the nymphs. 'We said we had two thumbs, but we meant one on
+each hand, stupid. Do? We should say not!'
+
+"The Sassafras was mortified. 'Well,' he said, 'that's all I can manage
+this season. I'm sorry not to have understood you young ladies and your
+needs. Come back again next spring.'
+
+"It was a long time to wait, but they waited. Next May----"
+
+Amy, now unworried by George Pearson, began to get the thread of the
+thing. Foster was sure the thread would run through. Hortense was still
+alert for ulterior meanings. Poor Cope, however, had no ambition to
+spin a double thread,--a single one was all he was equal to.
+
+"Next May the nymphs, after nursing their thumbs for a year----"
+
+Hortense frowned.
+
+"----came back again; and there, among the plain leaves and the
+double-lobed leaves, were several fresh bright, smooth ones with a
+single lobe well to one side,--the very thing for mittens. And------"
+
+"Yes, he has done it," Foster acknowledged.
+
+"And that," ended Cope rather stridently, as he rose to go on the flood
+of a sudden yet unexpected success, "is Why the Sassafras----"
+
+"Why the Sassafras has Three Kinds of Leaves!" cried Medora in triumph.
+Mittens for midsummer made no difficulty.
+
+Cope gave Carolyn careful thanks for her support at the piano, and did
+not see that she felt he too could be a poet if he only would. He went
+out of his way to shake hands with Hortense, and did not realize how
+nearly a new quarrel had opened. He stepped over to do the like with
+Amy; but she went out with him into the hall,--the only one of the
+party who did,--and even accompanied him to the front door.
+
+"Thank you so much," she said, looking up into his face smilingly and
+holding his hand with a long, clinging touch. "It went beautifully; and
+there are others that will go even better."
+
+"Others?" He thought, for an instant, that she was thanking him for his
+Legend and was even threatening to regard him as a flowing fount of
+invention; but he soon realized that her mind was fixed exclusively on
+their duet--if such it was to be called.
+
+"The deuce!" he thought. "Enough is enough."
+
+Despite his success with the Sassafras, he went home discomforted and
+even flustered. That hand was too much like the hand of possession. The
+girl was stealing over him like a light, intangible vapor. He struck
+ahead with a quicker gait, as if trying to outwalk a creeping fog. One
+consolation, however: Hortense had come like a puff of wind. Even a
+second squall from the same quarter would not be altogether amiss.
+
+And had there not been one further fleeting source of reassurance? Had
+he not, on leaving, caught through the open door of the drawing room an
+elevation of Medora Phillips' eyebrows which seemed to say fondly,
+indulgently, yet a bit ironically, "Oh, you foolish girl!"? Yet if a
+girl is foolish, and is going to persist in her folly, a lightly lifted
+pair of eyebrows will not always stay her course. Her gathering
+momentum is hardly to be checked by such slender means.
+
+
+
+
+19
+
+_COPE FINDS HIMSELF COMMITTED_
+
+
+Amy Leffingwell, having written once, found it easier to write again.
+And having strolled along the edge of the bluff with Cope on that
+fateful Sunday, she found it natural to intercept him on other parts of
+the campus (where their paths might easily cross), or to stroll with
+him, after casual encounters carefully planned, through sheets of
+fallen leaves under the wide avenues of elms just outside. Her third
+note almost summoned him to a rendezvous. It annoyed him; but he might
+have been more than annoyed had he known of her writing, rather simply,
+to a rather simple mother in Fort Lodge, Iowa, about her hopes and her
+expectations. Her mother had, of course, heard in detail of the rescue;
+and afterward had heard in still greater detail, as the roseate
+lime-light of idealization had come to focus more exactly on the scene.
+She had had also an unaffected appreciation--or several--of Cope's
+personal graces and accomplishments. She had heard, lastly, of Cope's
+song to her daughter's obbligato: a duet _in vacuo_, since Carolyn had
+been suppressed and the surrounding company had been banished to a
+remote circumference. What wonder that she began to see her daughter
+and Bertram Cope in an admirable isolation and to intimate that she
+hoped, very soon, for definite news?
+
+Well, not a few of us have met an Amy Leffingwell: some plump-faced,
+pink-cheeked child, with a delicate little concave nose not at all
+"strong," and a fine little chin none too vigorously moulded, and a
+pair of timid candid blue eyes shadowed by a wisp or so of fluffy
+hair--and have not always taken her for what she was. She "wouldn't
+hurt a kitten," we say; and we assume that her "striking out a line for
+herself" is the last thing she would try to do. Yet such an
+unimpressive and disarming façade may mask large chambers of
+stubbornness and tenacity.
+
+Amy knew how long and hard she had thought of Cope, and she asked for
+some evidence that he had been thinking long and hard of her. She
+desired a "response." But, in fact, he had been thinking of her only
+when he must. He thought of her whenever he saw himself caught in that
+flapping sail, and he thought of her whenever he recalled that she had
+taken it on herself to select his songs. But he did not want her to
+make out-and-out demands on his time and attention. Still less did he
+want her to talk about "happiness." This had come to be her favorite
+topic, and she discoursed on it profusely: he was almost ungracious
+enough to say that she did so glibly. "Happiness"--that conventional
+bliss toward which she was turning her mind as they strolled together
+on these late November afternoons--was for him a long way ahead. How
+furnish a house, how clothe and feed a wife?--at least until his thesis
+should be written and a place, with a real salary, found in the
+academic world. How, even, buy an engagement ring--that costly
+superfluity? How even contrive to pay for all the small gifts and
+attentions which an engagement involved? Yet why ask himself such
+questions? For he was conscious of a fundamental repugnance to any such
+scheme of life and was acutely aware that--for awhile, at least, and
+perhaps for always--he wanted to live in quite a different mode.
+
+Amy's confident assumptions began to fill the house, to alter its
+atmosphere. Medora Phillips, who had begun by raising her eyebrows in
+light criticism, now lowered them in frowning protest. She had found
+Cope "charming"; but this charm of his was to add to the attractiveness
+of her house and to give her a high degree of personal gratification.
+It was not to be frittered away; still less was it to be absorbed
+elsewhere. Hortense, who had been secretly at work on a portrait-sketch
+of Cope in oil, and rather despising herself for it, now began to make
+another bold picture in her own mind. She saw herself handing out the
+sketch to Cope in person, with an air of high bravado; she might say,
+if bad came to worse, that she had found some professional interest in
+his color or in his "planes." On one occasion Medora hardily
+requisitioned Cope for an evening at the theatre, in the city; miles in
+and miles back she had him in her car all to herself; and if Amy, next
+day, appeared to feel that wealth and organization had taken an unfair
+advantage of simple, honest love, Medora herself was troubled by no
+stirrings of conscience.
+
+The new atmosphere reached even Foster on the top floor; and when, one
+evening in mid-December, he finally carried out his long-meditated plan
+to dine with Randolph, the household situation was uppermost in his
+mind. That he had not the clearest understanding of the situation did
+not diminish his interest in it. Though he sat in the dark, and far
+apart, some sense all his own, cultivated through years of deprivation,
+came to his aid. Peter brought him down the street and round the
+corner; and Randolph's Chinaman, fascinated by his green shade and his
+tortuous method of locomotion (once out of his wheeled-chair), did the
+rest. "You had better stay all night," Randolph had suggested; and he
+was glad to avoid a second awkward trip on the same evening.
+
+Foster had wondered whether Cope would be present. He had not asked to
+meet him--for he hardly knew whether he wished to or not. Though this
+was an "occasion,"--and his,--he had left Randolph to act quite as he
+might choose. There was a third chair at table and Randolph delayed
+dinner ten minutes while waiting for it to be filled.
+
+"Well, let's go in and sit down," he said presently, with a slight
+twist of the mouth. He spoke lightly, as if it were as easy for Foster
+to sit down as for himself. But Foster got into his place after a
+moment and contrived to spread his napkin over his legs.
+
+"I expected Bertram Cope," Randolph went on; "but he isn't here, and I
+have no word from him and do not know whether----"
+
+He paused, obviously at a loss.
+
+"Not here?" repeated Foster. "Is there, then, one place where he is
+not?"
+
+"Why, Joe----!"
+
+"Our house is full of him!" Foster burst out raucously. He had removed
+the green _abat-jour_, for the candle-shades (as they sometimes will)
+were performing their office. In the low but clear light his face
+seemed distorted.
+
+"He rises to my floor like incense. The very halls and stairways reek
+with his charms and perfections."
+
+"Well, you escape him here," said Randolph ruefully.
+
+"The whole miserable place is steaming with expectation,--with the
+deadly aroma of a courtship going stale. I can't stand it! I can't
+stand it!"
+
+"Courtship?"
+
+"You may think it takes two, but it doesn't. That foolish girl has
+thrown the whole place into discomfort and confusion; and I don't know
+who's for or who's against----"
+
+"What foolish girl?" asked Randolph quickly. Sing-Lo was at his elbow,
+changing plates: it was assumed, justly enough, that he would not be
+able to follow the intricacies of a situation purely occidental.
+
+"Our Amy," replied Foster, with a dash of bitterness.
+
+"Amy Leffingwell?" asked Randolph, still more quickly.
+
+Foster had blind eyes, but alert ears. He felt that Randolph was
+surprised and displeased. And indeed his host was both. That boy fallen
+maladroitly in love? thought Randolph. It was a second check. He had
+exerted himself to show a friendliness for Cope, had expected to enjoy
+him while he stayed on for his months in town, and had hoped to help
+push his fortunes in whatever other field he might enter. He had even
+taken his present quarters--no light task, all the details
+considered--to make Cope's winter agreeable, no less than his own. And
+now? First the uncounted-upon friend from Wisconsin with whom Cope was
+arranging to live; next, this sudden, unexpected affair with that girl
+at Medora's. Did the fellow not know his own mind? Could he formulate
+no hard-and-fast plan? Here Randolph, in his disappointment,
+inconsistently forgot that a hard-and-fast plan was largely his real
+annoyance and grievance. Then he remembered. He looked at the vacant
+place, and tried for composure and justice.
+
+"I shall probably hear some good reason, in due time," he said.
+
+"I hope so," rejoined Foster; "but it takes these young fellows to be
+careless--and ungrateful." He made no pretense of ignoring the fact
+that Randolph had moved into this apartment more on account of Cope
+than for any other reason.
+
+"H'm, yes," responded Randolph thoughtfully. "I suppose it is the
+tendency of a young fellow who has never quite stood on his own legs
+financially to accept about everything that comes his way, and to
+accept it as a matter of course."
+
+"It is," said Foster.
+
+"I know that _I_ was that way," continued Randolph, looking studiously
+at the nearest candle-shade. "I was beyond the middle twenties before I
+quite launched out for myself, and any kindness received was taken
+without much question and without much thanks. I presume that he still
+has some assistance from home...."
+
+He dropped youthful insouciance over favors received to consider the
+change that marriage makes in a young man's status. "I wouldn't go so
+far as to assert that a young man married is a man that's marred----"
+
+"This _is_ stiff doctrine," Foster acknowledged.
+
+"But somehow he does seem done for. He is placed; he is cut off from
+wide ranges of interesting possibilities; he offers himself less
+invitingly to the roving imagination...."
+
+Meanwhile Cope, with Randolph's invitation driven altogether from his
+mind by more urgent matters, was pacing the streets, through the first
+snow-flurries of the winter, and was wondering, rather distractedly,
+just where he stood. Precisely what words, at a very brief yet critical
+juncture, had he said, or not said? Exactly how had he phrased--or
+failed to phrase--the syllables which constituted, perhaps, a
+turning-point in his life?
+
+Amy Leffingwell had demanded his attendance for one more walk, that
+afternoon, and he had not been dextrous enough, face to face with her,
+to refuse. She had expressed herself still more insistently on
+"happiness"--(on hers, his, theirs; the two were one, in her view)--and
+on a future shared together. In just what inadequate way had he tried
+to fend her off? Had he said, "I shall have to wait?" Or had his
+blundering tongue said, instead, "We should have to wait?"--or even
+worse, "We shall have to wait?" In any event, he had used that
+cowardly, temporizing word "wait"--for she had instantly seized upon
+it. Why, yes, indeed; she was willing to wait; she had expected to
+wait....
+
+He turned out from an avenue lighted with electric globes, past which
+the snowflakes were drifting, and entered a quieter and darker
+side-street. In the dusk she had put up her face, expecting to be
+kissed; and he, partly out of pity for the expression that came when he
+hesitated, and partly out of pure embarrassment and inexpertness, had
+lightly touched her lips. That had sealed it, possibly. He saw her
+sitting in rapt fancy in her bedroom--if not more vocal in the rooms
+below. He saw her writing to an unseen mother in a tone of joyful
+complacency, and looking at her finger for a ring which he could not
+place there. He saw the distaste of his own home circle, to which this
+event had come at least a year too soon. He saw the amazement, and
+worse, of Arthur Lemoyne, whose plans for coming to town were now all
+made and to whom this turn would prove a psychological shock which
+might deter him from coming at all. But, most of all, he saw--and felt
+to the depths of his being--his own essential repugnance to the life
+toward which he now seemed headed. What an outlook for Christmas! What
+an unpleasant surprise for his parents! What opportunity in Amy
+Leffingwell's holiday vacation at Fort Lodge to reinforce the written
+page by the spoken word! Still forgetful of his engagement with
+Randolph, he continued to walk the streets. He turned in at midnight,
+hoping he might sleep, and trusting that morning would throw a less
+sinister light on his misadventure.
+
+Long before this, Joseph Foster had been put to bed, by Sing-Lo, in
+this spare room. It was Foster's crutch, rather than a knightly sword,
+which leaned against the door-jamb; and it was Foster's crooked
+members, rather than the straight young limbs of Cope, which first
+found place among the sheets and blankets of that shining new brass
+bedstead.
+
+
+
+
+20
+
+_COPE HAS A DISTRESSFUL CHRISTMAS_
+
+
+Cope awakened at seven. After an early interval of happy lightness,
+there came suddenly and heavily the crushing sense of his predicament.
+How monstrous it was that one instant of time, one ill-considered
+action, one poorly-chosen word could clamp a repellent burden on a man
+for the rest of his life!
+
+Well, he must expect telephone messages and letters. They came. That
+afternoon Mrs. Peck had "a lady's voice" to report: "It sounded like a
+_young_ lady's voice," she added. And she looked at Cope with some
+curiosity: a "young lady" asking for him over the wire was the rarest
+thing in the world.
+
+Next day came the first note. The handwriting was utterly new to him;
+but his intuition, applied instantly to the envelope, told him of the
+source. The nail, driven, was now to be clinched. She had the right to
+ask him to come; and she did ask him to come--"soon."
+
+Cope's troubled eyes sought the calendar above his table. How many days
+to Christmas? How much time might he spend in Freeford? How long before
+Christmas might he arrange to leave Churchton? The holidays at home
+loomed as a harbor of refuge. By shortening as far as possible the
+interval here and by lengthening as far as possible the stay with his
+family, he might cut down, in some measure, the imminent threatenings
+of awkwardness and constraint; then, beyond the range of anything but
+letters, he might study the unpleasant situation at his leisure and
+determine a future course.
+
+He set himself to answer Amy's note. He hoped, he said, to see her in a
+few days, but he was immensely busy in closing the term-work before the
+holidays; he also suggested that their affair--"their" affair!--be kept
+quiet for the present. Yet he had all too facile a vision of beatific
+meditations that were like enough to give the situation away to all the
+household; and he was nervously aware of Amy Leffingwell as continually
+on the verge of bubbling confidences.
+
+He also wrote to Lemoyne. His letter was less an announcement than a
+confession.
+
+"I like this!" began Lemoyne's reply, with abrupt, impetuous sarcasm.
+"You have claimed, more than once," he went on, "to have steadied me
+and kept me out of harm's way; but I've never yet made any such demands
+on you as you are making on me. This thing can't go on, and you know it
+as well as I do. Nip it. Nip it now. Don't think that our intimacy is
+to end in any such fashion as this, for it isn't--especially at this
+particular time."...
+
+Lemoyne proceeded to practical matters. "If that room is still free,
+engage it from the first of January. I will have a few things sent
+down. Father is weakening a little. Anyhow, I've got enough money for a
+couple of months. I will join you in Freeford between Christmas and New
+Year's (nearer the latter, probably), and we will go back together."...
+
+Cope rather took heart from these rough, outspoken lines. Lemoyne was
+commonly neither rough nor outspoken; but here was an emergency,
+involving his own interests, which must be dealt with decisively. Cope
+seemed to feel salvation on the way. Perhaps that was why he still did
+so little to save himself. He took the new room; he had one meeting
+with Amy; and he left for home at least two days before he was strictly
+entitled to do so.
+
+The meeting took place in Mrs. Phillips' drawing-room; he would trust
+himself to no more strolls on the campus, to no more confabs in college
+halls. There was protection in numbers, and numbers seldom failed
+beneath Medora Phillips' roof. They failed this time, however. Mrs.
+Phillips and Hortense were away at a reading; only Amy and Carolyn were
+at home. Cope seized on Carolyn as at a straw. He thanked her warmly
+again for her halting offices in the matter of that last song, and he
+begged that he might hear some of her recent verse. His appeal was
+vehement, almost boisterous: Carolyn, surprised, felt that he was ready
+at last to grant her a definite personality.
+
+Amy tried in vain to remove Carolyn from the board. But Carolyn, like
+Hortense, had finally joined the ranks of the "recognized"; she was
+determined (being still ignorant, Cope was glad to see, regarding Amy's
+claims) to make this recognition so marked as to last beyond the
+moment. She played a little--not well. She read. She even accompanied
+Amy to the door at the close of Cope's short stay. He shook hands with
+them both. He had decided that he would do no more than this with Amy,
+in any event, and Carolyn's presence made his predetermined course
+easy, even obligatory. Yet he went out into the night feeling, somehow,
+that he had acted solely on his resolution and that he might consider
+himself a man of some decisiveness, after all. Amy had looked
+disappointed, but had contrived to whisper that she would write from
+Iowa. That, of course, was to be looked for, and would represent the
+combined efforts of herself and her home circle; yet he had a fortnight
+for consideration and counsel.
+
+Cope, during his first few days at home, was moody and abstracted: his
+parents found him adding little to the Christmas cheer. His mother,
+always busy over domestic cares and now busier than ever, thought that
+he must have been working too hard. She would stand in the kitchen door
+with a half-trimmed pie on one hand and ponder him as he sat in the
+dining-room, staring absorbedly at the Franklin stove. His father, who
+saw him chiefly in the evening, by the gas-light of the old-fashioned
+house, found his face slightly pinched: was his pocket pinched too, and
+would he be likely, before leaving, to ask help toward making up a
+deficit? His sister Rosalys, who lived a life of dry routine, figured
+him as deep in love. He let several days pass without hinting what the
+real situation was.
+
+There was interest all round when, the day before Christmas, the
+postman came along the bleak and flimsy street and left a letter for
+him. Cope was away from the house, and Rosalys, studying the envelope's
+penmanship and even its postmark, found vague confirmation of her
+theory: some college girl--one of his own students, probably--was home
+on vacation just as he was. If so, a "small town" person of caste and
+character like themselves; not brilliant, but safe. She set up the
+letter edgewise on the back parlor mantelpiece.
+
+When Cope came in at noon and saw the letter, his face fell. He put it
+in his pocket, sat silent at table, and disappeared as soon as the meal
+was over. Rosalys, whose pupils were off her mind for a few days and
+who had thought to spare, began to shade her theory.
+
+Cope read the letter in the low-ceiled back bedroom (the ceiling sloped
+away on one side) which had been his for so many years. Those years of
+happy boyhood--how far away they seemed now, and how completely past!
+Surely he had never thought to come back to these familiar walls to
+such effect as this.... Well, what did it say?
+
+It said, in its four pages (yes, Amy had really limited herself thus),
+how joyous she was that the dear Christmas season had brought her such
+a beautiful love-gift; it said that mother was so pleased and
+happy--and even mentioned a sudden aunt; it said how willingly she
+would wait on until....
+
+That evening Cope made his announcement. They were all seated round the
+reading-lamp in the back parlor, where the old Brussels carpet looked
+dim and where only venerated age kept the ornate French clock from
+seeming tawdry. Cope looked down at the carpet and up at the clock, and
+spoke.
+
+Yes, they must have it.
+
+His mother took the shock first and absorbed most of it. She led a
+humdrum life and she was ready to welcome romance. To help adjust
+herself she laid her hands, with a soft, sweeping motion, on the two
+brown waves that drew smoothly across her temples, and then she
+transferred them to his, held his head, and gave him a kiss. Rosalys
+took his two hands warmly and smiled, and he tried to smile back. His
+father twisted the tip of his short gray beard, watched his son's mien,
+and said little. Day after to-morrow, with the major part of their
+small Christmas festivities over, he would ask how this unexpected and
+unwarranted situation had come about, and how, in heaven's name, the
+thing was to be carried through: by what means, with whose help?... In
+his complex of thought the word "thesis" came to his tongue, but he
+kept from speaking it. He had been advised that his son had at last
+struck out definitely into some bookish bypath--just what bypath
+mattered little, he gathered, if it were but followed to the end. Yet
+the end was still far--and the boy evidently realized this. He was glad
+that Bertram was sober over the prospect and over his present
+plan--which was a serious undertaking, just now, in truth.
+
+Cope had to adjust himself to all this, and to endure, besides, the
+congratulations--or the comments--of a number of tiresome relatives;
+and it was a relief when, on the twenty-ninth, Arthur Lemoyne finally
+arrived.
+
+Lemoyne had been heralded as a young man of parts, and as the son of a
+family which enjoyed, in Winnebago, some significant share of worldly
+prosperity, and, therefore, of social consideration. The simpler Copes,
+putting him in the other back bedroom, the ceiling of which sloped the
+opposite way, wondered if they were quite giving him his just dues.
+When Rosalys came to set away his handbag and to rearrange, next
+morning, his brushes on the top of the dresser, she gathered from
+various indications supplied by his outfit that the front chamber, at
+whatever inconvenience to whomever, would have been more suitable. But,
+"Never mind," said her mother; "they'll do very well as they are--side
+by side, with the door conveniently between. Then Bert can look after
+him a little more and we a little less."
+
+Lemoyne presented himself to the combined family gaze as a young man of
+twenty-seven or so, with dark, limpid eyes, a good deal of dark, wavy
+hair, and limbs almost too plumply well-turned. In his hands the flesh
+minimized the prominence of joints and knuckles, and the fingers
+(especially the little fingers) displayed certain graceful, slightly
+affected movements of the kind which may cause a person to be
+credited--or taxed--with possessing the "artistic temperament." To end
+with, he carried two inches of short black stubble under his nose. He
+was a type which one may admire--or not. Rosalys Cope found in him a
+sort of picturesque allure. Rather liking him herself, she found a
+different reason for her brother's liking. "If Bert cares for him," she
+remarked, "I suppose it's largely by contrast--he's so spare and
+light-colored himself."
+
+It was evident that, on this first meeting, Lemoyne meant to ingratiate
+himself--to make himself attractive and entertaining. He had determined
+to say a thing or two before he went away, and it would be advantageous
+to consolidate his position.
+
+He had had five or six hours of cross-country travel, with some tedious
+waits at junctions, and at about ten o'clock, after some showy
+converse, he acknowledged himself tired enough for bed. Cope saw him
+up, and did not come down again. The two talked till past eleven; and
+even much later, when light sleepers in other parts of the house were
+awake for a few minutes, muffled sounds from the same two voices
+reached their ears.
+
+But Cope's words, many as they were, told Lemoyne nothing that he did
+not know, little that he had not divined. The sum of all was this: Cope
+did not quite know how he had got into it; but he knew that he was
+miserable and wanted to get out of it.
+
+Lemoyne had asked, first of all, to see the letter from Iowa. "Oh,
+come," Cope had replied, half-bashful, half-chivalrous, "you know it
+wasn't written for anybody but me."
+
+"The substance of it, then," Lemoyne had demanded; and Cope, reluctant
+and shame-faced, had given it. "You've never been in anything of this
+sort, you know," he submitted.
+
+"I should say not!" Lemoyne retorted. "Nor you, either. You're not in
+it now,--or, if you are, you're soon going to be out of it. You would
+help me through a thing like this, and I'm going to help you."
+
+The talk went on. Lemoyne presented the case for a broken engagement.
+Engagements, as it was well known to human experience, might, if
+quickly made, be as quickly unmade: no novelty in that. "I had never
+expected to double up with an engaged man," Lemoyne declared further.
+"Nothing especially jolly about that--least of all when the poor wretch
+is held dead against his will." As he went on, he made Cope feel that
+he had violated an _entente_ of long standing, and had almost brought a
+trusting friend down from home under false pretenses.
+
+But phrases from Amy's letter continued to plague Cope. There was a
+confiding trust, a tender who-could-say-just-what?...
+
+"Well," said Lemoyne, at about two o'clock, "let's put it off till
+morning. Turn over and go to sleep."
+
+But before he fell asleep himself he resolved that he would make the
+true situation clear next day. He would address that sympathetic mother
+and that romantic sister in suitably cogent terms; the father, he felt
+sure, would require no effort and would even welcome his aid with a
+strong sense of relief.
+
+So next day, Lemoyne, deploying his natural graces and his dramatic
+dexterities, drew away the curtain. He did not go so far as to say that
+Bertram had been tricked; he did not even go so far as to say that he
+had been inexpert: he contented himself with saying that his friend had
+been over-chivalrous and that his fine nature had rather been played
+upon. The mother took it all with a silent, inexpressive
+thoughtfulness, though it was felt that she did not want her boy to be
+unhappy. Rosalys, if she admired Lemoyne a little more, now liked him
+rather less. Her father, when the declaration reached him by secondary
+impact, did feel the sense of relief which Lemoyne had anticipated, and
+came to look upon him as an able, if somewhat fantastic, young fellow.
+
+Cope himself, when his father questioned him, said with frank
+disconsolateness, "I'm miserable!" And, "I wish to heaven I were out of
+it!" he added.
+
+"_Get_ out of it," his father counselled; and when Cope's own feelings
+were clearly known through the household there was no voice of dissent.
+"And then buckle down for your degree," the elder added, to finish.
+
+"If I only could!" exclaimed Cope, with a wan face,--convinced,
+youthfully, that the trouble through which he was now striving must
+last indefinitely. "I should be glad enough to get my mind on it, I'm
+sure."
+
+He walked away to reconstruct a devastated privacy. "Arthur, I'm not
+quite sure that I thank you," he said, later.
+
+"H'm!" replied Lemoyne non-committally. "I hope," he added, more
+definitely articulate, "that we're going to have a pleasanter life in
+our new quarters. I'm getting mighty little pleasure--if you'll just
+understand me--here!"
+
+
+
+
+21
+
+_COPE, SAFEGUARDED, CALLS AGAIN_
+
+
+If Cope came back from Freeford with the moral support of one family,
+Amy Leffingwell came back from Fort Lodge with the moral support of
+another. Hers was a fragmental family, true; but its sentiment was
+unanimous; she had the combined support of a pleased mother and of an
+enthusiastic maiden aunt.
+
+Amy reached Churchton first, and it soon transpired through the house
+in which she lived that she was engaged to Bertram Cope. Cope,
+returning two days later, with Lemoyne, found his new status an open
+book to the world--or to such a small corner of the world as cared to
+read.
+
+Cope had written from Freeford, explaining to Randolph the broken
+dinner-engagement: at least he had said that immediate concerns of
+importance had driven the date from his mind, and that he was sorry.
+Randolph, only too willing to accept any fair excuse, good-naturedly
+made this one serve: the boy was not so negligent and ungrateful, after
+all. He got the rest of the story a few days later, in a message from
+Foster. What _was_ the boy, then? he asked himself. He recalled their
+talk as they had walked past the sand-hills on that October Sunday.
+Cope had disclaimed all inclination for matrimony. He had confessed a
+certain inability to safeguard himself. Was he a victim, after all? A
+victim to his own ineptitude? A victim to his own highmindedness? Well,
+whatever the alternative, a field for the work of the salvage-corps had
+opened.
+
+At the big house on Ashburn Avenue a like feeling had come to prevail.
+Medora Phillips herself had passed from the indulgently satirical to
+the impatient, and almost to the indignant. Her niece thought the new
+relation clearly superfluous. She put away the portrait in oil, but she
+rather hoped to resume work on it, some time. Meanwhile, she was far
+from kind to Amy.
+
+Cope soon made an obligatory appearance at the house. He was glad
+enough to have the presence and the support of Arthur Lemoyne. The call
+came on a rigorous evening at the beginning of the second week in
+January. The two young men had about brought their new quarters to
+shape and subjection. They had spent two or three evenings in shifting
+and rearranging things--trifling purchases in person and larger things
+sent by express. They had reached a good degree of snugness and
+comfort; but----
+
+"We've got to go tonight!" said Cope firmly.
+
+"Tonight?" repeated Lemoyne. "Unless I'm mistaken, we're in for a deuce
+of a time." He snuggled again into the big easy chair that had just
+arrived from Winnebago.
+
+"We are!" returned Cope, with unhappy mien. "But it's got to be gone
+through with."
+
+"I'm talking about the weather," rejoined Lemoyne plumply. He was
+versed in the reading of signs as they presented themselves a hundred
+and fifty miles to the north, and he thought he could accurately apply
+his experience to a locale somewhat beyond his earlier ken. The vast
+open welter of water to the east would but give the roaring north
+wind a greater impetus. "We're going to have tonight the storm of the
+season."
+
+"Storm or no storm, I can't put it off any longer. I've got to go."
+
+As they started out the wind was keen, and a few fine flakes, driven
+from the north, flew athwart their faces. When they reached Mrs.
+Phillips' house, Peter, wrapped in furs, was sitting in the limousine
+by the curb, and two or three people were seen in the open door of the
+vestibule.
+
+"Well, the best of luck, _cher Professeur_," Cope heard the voice of
+Mrs. Phillips saying, in a quick expulsion of syllables. "This is going
+to be a bad night, I'm afraid; but I hope your audience will get to the
+hall to hear you, and that our Pierre will be able to get you back to
+us."
+
+"Oh, Madame," returned the plump little man, "what a climate!" And he
+ran down the walk to the car.
+
+Yes, Mrs. Phillips had another celebrity on her hands. It was an
+eminent French historian who was going across to the campus to deliver
+the second lecture of his course. "How lucky," she had said to
+Hortense, just after dinner, "that we went to hear him _last_ night!"
+Their visitor was handsomely accommodated--and suitably, too, she
+felt--in the Louis Quinze chamber, and he was expected back in it a
+little after ten.
+
+"Why, Bertram Cope!" she exclaimed, as the two young men came up the
+walk while the great historian ran down; "come in, come in; don't let
+me stand here freezing!"
+
+It turned out to be a young man's night. Mrs. Phillips had invited a
+few "types" to entertain and instruct her Frenchman. They had come to
+dinner, and they had stayed on afterward.
+
+Among them was the autumn undergraduate whom Cope, at an earlier day,
+had disdainfully called "Phaon," a youth of twenty. "You know," said
+Medora Phillips to Randolph, a few days later, when reviewing the stay
+of her newest guest, "Those sophisticated, world-worn people so
+appreciate our fresh, innocent, ingenuous boys. M. Pelouse told me, on
+leaving, that Roddy quite met his ideal of the young American. So
+open-faced, so inexperienced, so out of the great world...."
+
+"Good heavens!" said Randolph impatiently. "Do they constitute the
+world? You might think so,--going about giving us awards, and hanging
+medals on us, and certifying how well we speak French! Fudge! The world
+is changing. It would be better," he added, "if more of us--college
+students included--learned how to speak a decenter English. I went to
+their dramatic club the other evening. Such pronunciation! Such
+delivery! I almost longed for the films."
+
+A second "young American" was present--George F. Pearson. Pearson lived
+with his parents in another big house a block down the street. Mrs.
+Phillips had summoned him as a type that was purely indigenous--the
+"young American business man." Pearson had just made a "kill," as he
+called it--a coup executed quite without the aid of his father, and he
+was too full of his success to keep still; he was more typical than
+ever. The Professor had looked at him in staring wonder. So had Amy
+Leffingwell--in the absence of another target for her large, intent
+eyes.
+
+But Medora Phillips knew all about George and Roddy. The novelty was
+Lemoyne, and she must learn about him. She readily seized the points
+that composed his personal aspect, which she found good: his general
+darkness and richness made him a fine foil for Cope. She quickly
+credited him with a pretty complete battery of artistic aptitudes and
+apprehensions. She felt certain that he would appreciate her ballroom
+and picture-gallery, and would figure well within it. The company was
+young, the night was wild, and cheer was the word. She presently led
+the way upstairs. Foster, as soon as he heard the first voices in the
+hall and the first footfalls on the bare treads of the upper stairs,
+shut his door.
+
+Lemoyne felt the big bare room--bare save for a piano and a fringe of
+chairs and settles, large and small--as a stage; and he surmised that
+he, the new-comer, was expected to exhibit himself on it. He became
+consciously the actor. He tried now the assertive note, and now the
+quiet note; somehow the quiet was the louder of the two. Pearson, who
+was in a conquering mood tonight, scented a rival in the general
+attention, and one not wholly unworthy. Pearson was the only one of the
+four in evening dress, and he felt that to be an advantage. He, at
+least, had been properly attired to meet the elegant visitor from
+abroad. As for poor Roddy, he had come in an ordinary sack: perhaps it
+was partly this which had prompted M. Pelouse (who was of course
+dressed for the platform) to find the boy such a paragon of simple
+innocence.
+
+All costumes were alike to Lemoyne; he had appeared in dozens. If he
+lacked costume now, he made it up in manner. He had bestowed an
+immensity of manner on Amy Leffingwell, downstairs: his cue had been a
+high, delicate, remote gravity. "I know, I know," he seemed to say;
+"and I make no comment." Upstairs he kept close by Cope: he was
+proprietary; he was protective. If Cope settled down in a large chair,
+Lemoyne would drape himself over the arm of it; and his hand would
+fall, as like as not, on the back of the chair, or even on Cope's
+shoulder. And when he came to occupy the piano-stool, Cope, standing
+alongside, would lay a hand on his. Mrs. Phillips noticed these minor
+familiarities and remarked on them to Foster, who had lately wheeled
+his chair in. Foster, a few days later, passed the comment on to
+Randolph, with an astringent comment of his own.--At all events, Amy
+Leffingwell remained in the distance, and George Pearson shared the
+distance with her.
+
+Foster had broken from his retirement on hearing the voices of Cope and
+Lemoyne combined in song. The song was "Larboard Watch," and he
+remembered how his half-brother had sung in it during courtship, with
+the young fellow who had acted, later, as his best man. Lemoyne, at the
+first word of invitation, had seated himself at the instrument--a
+lesser than the "grand" downstairs, but not unworthy; then, with but a
+measure or so of prelude, the two voices had begun to ring out in the
+old nautical ballad. Lemoyne felt the composition to be primitive,
+antiquated and of slight value; but he had received his cue, and both
+his throat and his hands wrought with an elaborate expressiveness. He
+sang and played, if not with sincerity, at least with effect. His voice
+was a high, ringing tenor; not too ringing for Cope's resonant
+baritone, but almost too sweet: a voice which might cloy (if used
+alone) within a few moments. Cope was a perfect second, and the two
+went at it with a complete unity of understanding and of sentiment.
+Together they viewed--in thirds--"the gath'ring clouds";
+together--still in thirds--they roused themselves "at the welcome call"
+of "Larboard watch, ahoy!" Disregarding the mere words, they attained,
+at the finish, to something like feeling--or even like a touch of
+passion. Medora Phillips had never heard Cope sing like that before;
+had never seen so much animation in his singing face. By the fourth bar
+there had been tears in her eyes, and there was a catch in her breath
+when she exclaimed softly, "You dear boys!" It was too soon, of course,
+to make Lemoyne "dear"--the one boy was Cope. It was really his voice
+which she had heard through the soaring, insinuating tones of the
+other. Foster, sitting beside her, suddenly raised his shade and peered
+out questioningly, both at the singers and at his sister-in-law. He
+seemed surprised--and more.
+
+Pearson was surprised too, but kept his applause within limits.
+However, he praised Lemoyne for his accompaniment. Then he begged Amy
+for an air on the violin; and while they were determining who should
+play her accompaniment, the wind raged more wildly round the gables and
+the thickening snow drove with a fiercer impetus against the windows.
+
+Lemoyne (who was a perfectly good sight-reader) begged that he might
+not be condemned to spoil another's performance. This was the result of
+an understanding between Cope and himself that neither was to
+contribute further. Presently a simple piece was selected through which
+the unskilled Carolyn might be trusted to pick her way. Cope listened
+with a decorous attention which was designed to indicate the highest
+degree of sympathetic interest; but his attitude, so finely composed
+within, yet so ineffectively displayed without, was as nothing to the
+loud promptness of Pearson's praise. Amy glanced at Cope with
+questioning surprise; but she met Pearson's excesses of commendation
+with a gratified smile.
+
+Shortly before ten o'clock there was a stir at the front door. Mrs.
+Phillips rose hastily. "It is M. Pelouse; let me go down and pet him."
+
+Yes, it was M. Pelouse. "Oh, Madame!" he said, as before, but with an
+expressiveness doubly charged, "what a climate!" He was panting and was
+covered with fine snow. Behind him was Peter, looking very grave and
+dour.
+
+"Shall I be wanted further?" asked Peter in a tense tone, and with no
+trace of his usual good-natured smile.
+
+"What! Again?" cried Mrs. Phillips, while Helga, farther up the hall,
+was undoing the Professor; "three times on a night like this? No,
+indeed! Get back into the garage as fast as you can."
+
+"Oh, Madame!" said the Professor, now out of his wrappings and in
+better control of his voice. "They were so faithful to our beautiful
+France! The _salle_ was almost full!"
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Phillips to herself, "they got there all right, then.
+I hope most of them will get back home alive!"
+
+"What a climate!" M. Pelouse was still saying, as he entered the
+ball-room. He had not been there before. He ran an appraising eye over
+the pictures and said little. But as soon as he learned that some of
+them were the work of the late M. Phillips he found words. He led the
+company through a tasteful jungle of verbosity, and left the ultimate
+impression that Monsieur had been a remarkable man, whether as artist
+or as collector.
+
+Yet he did not forget to say once more, "What a climate!"
+
+"Is it really bad outside?" asked Pearson. M. Pelouse shrugged his
+shoulders. It was _affreux_.
+
+"It is indeed," corroborated Mrs. Phillips: she had spent her moment at
+the front door. "Nobody that I can find room for leaves my house
+tonight." This meant that Cope and Lemoyne were to occupy the chintz
+chamber.
+
+M. Pelouse gradually regained himself. Cope interested him. Cope was,
+in type, the more "American" of the two new arrivals. He was also, as
+M. Pelouse had heard, the _pretendant_,--yes, the _fiance_. Well, he
+was calm and inexpressive enough: no close and eager attendance; cool,
+cool. "How interesting," said the observer to himself. "And
+Mademoiselle, quite across the room, and quite taken up"--happily, too,
+it seemed--"with another man: with the other man, perhaps?..."
+
+At half past ten Pearson rose to leave; Cope and Lemoyne rose at the
+same time. "No," said Mrs. Phillips, stopping them both; "you mustn't
+think of trying to go. I can't ask Peter to take you, and you could
+never get across on foot in the world. I can find a place for you."
+
+"And about poor Roddy?" asked Hortense.
+
+"Roddy may stay with me," declared Pearson. "I can put him up. Come on,
+Aldridge," he said; "you're good for a hundred yard dash." And down
+they started.
+
+"I don't want to stay," muttered Cope to Lemoyne, under cover of the
+others' departure. "Devil take it; it's the last thing in the world I
+want to do!"
+
+"It's awkward," returned Lemoyne, "but we're in for it. After all, it
+isn't _her_ house, nor her family's. Besides, you've got me."
+
+Mrs. Phillips summoned Helga and another maid, who were just on the
+point of going to bed, and directed their efforts toward the chintz
+chamber. "Ah, well," thought M. Pelouse, "the _fiance_, then, is going
+to remain over night in the house of his _fiancee_!" It was droll; yet
+there were extenuating circumstances. But--such a singular climate,
+such curious temperaments, such a general chill! And M. Pelouse was
+presently lost to view among the welcome trappings of Louis Quinze.
+
+
+
+
+22
+
+_COPE SHALL BE RESCUED_
+
+
+Next morning Cope left the house before breakfast. He had had the
+forethought to plead an exceptionally early engagement, and thus he
+avoided meeting, after the strain of the evening before, any of the
+various units of the household. He and Lemoyne, draping their
+parti-colored pajamas over the foot of the bedstead, left the chintz
+chamber at seven and walked out into the new day. The air was cold and
+tingling; the ground was white as a sheet; the sky was a strident,
+implacable blue. The glitter and the glare assaulted their sleepy eyes.
+They turned up their collars, thrust their hands deep into their
+pockets, and took briskly the half mile which led to their own
+percolator and electric toaster.
+
+Cope threw himself down on the bed and let Lemoyne get the breakfast.
+Well, he had called; he had done the just and expected thing; he had
+held his face through it all; but he was tired after a night of much
+thought and little sleep. Possibly he might not have to call again for
+a full week. If 'phone messages or letters came, he would take them as
+best he could.
+
+Nor was Lemoyne very alert. He was less prompt than usual in gaining
+his early morning loquacity. His coffee was lacking in spirit, and much
+of his toast was burnt. But the two revived, in fair measure, after
+their taxing walk.
+
+They had talked through much of the dead middle of the night. Foster,
+wakeful and restless, had become exasperated beyond all power of a
+return to sleep. Concerns of youth and love kept them murmuring,
+murmuring in the acute if distant ears of one whom youth had left and
+for whom love was impossible. Beyond his foolish, figured wall were two
+contrasted types of young vigor, and they babbled, babbled on, in the
+sensitized hearing of one from whom vigor was gone and for whom hope
+was set.
+
+"What do you think of her?" Cope had asked. Then he had thrown his face
+into his pillow and left one ear for the reply.
+
+"She is a clinger," returned Lemoyne. "She will cling until she is
+loosened by something or somebody. Then she will cling to the second
+somebody as hard as she did to the first. I'm not so sure that it's you
+as an individual especially."
+
+Cope had now no self-love to consider, no self-esteem to guard. He did
+not raise his face from out the pillow to reply. But he found Lemoyne
+rather drastic. Arthur had shown himself much in earnest, of course; he
+had the right, doubtless, to be reproachful; and he was fertile in
+suggestions looking toward his friend's freedom. Yet his expedients
+were not always delicate or fair: Cope would have welcomed a lighter
+hand on his exacerbated spirit, a more disinterested, more impartial
+touch. He was glad when, one afternoon at five, a few days later, he
+met Randolph on the steps of the library. Randolph, by his estimate,
+was disinterested and impartial.
+
+
+The weather still held cold: it was no day for spending time,
+conversationally, outside; and they stepped back for a little into a
+recess of the vestibule. Cope found an opening by bolstering up his
+previous written excuses. He was still very general.
+
+"That's all right," replied Randolph, in friendly fashion. "Some time,
+soon, we must try again. And this time we must have your friend." His
+glance was kind, yet keen; nor was it brief.
+
+Randolph had already the outlines of the situation as Foster understood
+them. He sometimes slipped in, on Sunday forenoon, to read the
+newspapers to Foster, instead of going to church. Hortense and Carolyn
+came up now and then: indeed, this reading was, theoretically, a part
+of Carolyn's duties, but she was coming less and less frequently, and
+often never got beyond the headlines. So that, every other Sunday at
+least, Randolph set aside prayer-book and hymnal for dramatic
+criticisms, editorials, sports and "society."
+
+This time Foster was full of the events of Friday night. "As I make it
+out, he kept away from her the whole evening, and that new man helped
+him do it. Our friend down the street, Hortense says, showed every
+disposition to cut in, and the girl showed at least some disposition to
+let him. I don't wonder: when you come right down to it, he's twice the
+man the other is."
+
+"Young Pearson?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Clever lad. Confident. But brash. Just what his father used to be."
+
+"He praised her playing. Cope sat dumb. And next morning he hurried
+away before breakfast. You know what kind of a morning it was. Anything
+very pressing at the University on a Saturday morning at eight?"
+
+"I hardly know."
+
+"How about this sudden new friend?" Foster twitched in his chair.
+"Medora," he went on, "seems to have no special fancy for him. She even
+objects to his calling Cope 'Bert.' Of course he sings. And he seems to
+be self-possessed and clever. But 'self-possessed'--that doesn't
+express it. He was so awfully, so publicly, at home; at least that's as
+I gather it. Always hanging over the other man's chair; always finding
+a reason to put his hand on his shoulder...."
+
+"Body-guard? No wonder Pearson came to the fore."
+
+"I don't know. What I've heard makes me think of----"
+
+And here, Foster, speaking with a keen and complicated acerbity,
+recalled how, during earlier years of travel, he had had opportunity to
+observe a young married couple at a Saratoga hotel. They had made their
+partiality too public, and an elderly lady not far away in the vast
+"parlor" had audibly complained that they brought the manners of the
+bed-chamber into the drawing-room.
+
+"They talked half through the night, too," Foster added bitterly.
+
+"Young men's problems," said Randolph. "Possibly they were considering
+Pearson."
+
+"Possibly," repeated Foster; and neither followed further, for a
+moment, the pathway of surmise.
+
+Presently Randolph rose and scuffled through the ruck of newspapers,
+with which no great progress had been made. "Is Medora at home?" he
+asked.
+
+"I think she's off at church," said Foster discontentedly. "And
+Hortense went with her."
+
+"I'll call her up later. If I can get her for Wednesday--and Pearson
+too...."
+
+Foster, accustomed to piecing loose ends as well as he could, did not
+ask him to finish. Randolph picked up a crumpled sheet from the floor,
+reseated himself, and read out the account of yesterday's double
+performance at the opera.
+
+When Randolph, then, met Cope in the vestibule of the library, on
+Monday, he felt that he had ground under his feet. Just how solid, just
+how extensive, he was not quite sure; but he could safely take a few
+steps experimentally. Cope was a picture of uncertainty and woe; his
+face was an open bid for sympathy and aid.
+
+"You are unhappy," said Randolph; "and I think I know why." He meant to
+advance toward the problem as if it were a case of jealousy--a matter
+of Pearson's intrusion and of Amy's seemingly willing acceptance of it.
+
+Cope soon caught Randolph's idea, and he stared. He did not at all
+resent Randolph's advances; misapprehension, in fact, might serve as
+fairly, in the end, as the clearest understanding.
+
+Randolph placed his hand on Cope's shoulder. "You have only to assert
+yourself," he said. "The other man is an intruder; it would be easy to
+warn him off before he starts in to win her."
+
+"George Pearson?" said Cope. "Win her? In heaven's name," he blurted
+out, "let him!"
+
+It was a cry of distaste and despair, in which no rival was concerned.
+Randolph now had the situation in its real lines.
+
+"Well, this is no place for a talk," he said. "If you should care to
+happen in on me some evening before long...."
+
+"I have Wednesday," returned Cope, with eagerness.
+
+"Not Wednesday. I have an engagement for that evening. But any evening
+a little later."
+
+"Friday? The worst of my week's work is over by then."
+
+"Friday will do." And they parted.
+
+Randolph had secured for his Wednesday evening Medora Phillips and
+Hortense. Hortense was the young person to pair with Pearson, who had
+thrown over an evening at his club for the dinner with Randolph. The
+talk was to be--in sections and installments--of Amy Leffingwell, and
+of Cope in so far as he might enter. Medora would speak; Hortense would
+speak; Randolph himself should speak. To complete the party he had
+asked his relations from the far side of the big city. His sister would
+preside for him; and his brother-in-law might justify his expenditure
+of time and trouble by stopping off in advance for a brief confab, as
+trustee, at the administration building, with the president. A
+compatriot had been secured by Sing-Lo to help in dining-room and
+kitchen.
+
+Randolph had planned a short dinner. His sister, facing the long
+return-drive, would doubtless be willing to leave by nine-thirty. Then,
+with two extraneous pieces removed from the board, the real matter in
+hand might be got under way.
+
+Mrs. Phillips was most lively from the start. She praised the house,
+which she was seeing for the first time. She extolled Sing-Lo's
+department, and Sing-Lo, who delighted in entertainments, was one broad
+smile. She had a word of encouragement for his less smiling helper,
+whom she informally christened Sing-Hi; and she chatted endlessly with
+Mrs. Brackett--perhaps even helped tire her out. Yes, George Pearson
+was to be urged forward for the rescue of Bertram Cope.
+
+Pearson spoke up loud and clear among the males. He was a business-man
+among business-men, and during the very few moments formally allowed
+for the cigars he made himself, as he felt, tell. And after the
+Bracketts left--at nine twenty-five--he was easily content to stay on
+for three-quarters of an hour longer.
+
+At nine-forty Pearson was saying, amidst the cigarette-smoke of the den:
+
+"Does she expect to teach the violin all her life?"
+
+He was both ironical and impatient. Clearly a charming, delicate
+creature like Amy Leffingwell might better decorate the domestic scene
+of some gentleman who enjoyed position and prosperity.
+
+"I hope not, indeed," said Hortense, in a deep contralto.
+
+Pearson cast on Hortense a look which rewarded such discernment.
+
+"Of course he has nothing, now," said Randolph, with deliberation. "And
+he may be nothing but a poor, underpaid professor all his life."
+
+"No ring--yet," said Hortense, further. Her "yet" meant "not even yet."
+Her deep tone was plausibly indignant.
+
+"I'm rather glad of that," remarked Mrs. Phillips, with an eye
+pretendedly fixed on the Mexican dolls. "I can't feel that they are
+altogether suited to each other."
+
+"He doesn't care for her," pursued Hortense.
+
+"Does she really care for him?" asked Pearson.
+
+No answer. One pair of eyes sought the floor; another searched the
+ceiling; a third became altogether subordinate to questioning,
+high-held brows.
+
+Pearson glanced from one face to another. The doubt as to her "caring"
+seemed universal. The doubt that she cared deeply, essentially, was one
+that he had brought away from the ball-room. And he went home, at ten
+twenty-three, pretty well determined that he would very soon try to
+change doubt to certainty.
+
+"Thank you so much," said Mrs. Phillips to Randolph, as he went out
+with her and Hortense to put them in the car. "I'm sure we don't want
+him to be burdened and miserable; and I'm sure we all do want her to be
+happy. George is a lovely, capable chap,--and, really, he has quite a
+way."
+
+
+
+
+23
+
+_COPE REGAINS HIS FREEDOM_
+
+
+
+On Friday evening Randolph, at home, was glancing now and then at the
+clock (as on a previous occasion), while waiting for Cope. At
+eight-fifteen the telephone rang; it was Cope, with excuses, as before.
+He was afraid he should be unable to come; some unexpected work... It
+was that autumn excursion all over again.
+
+Randolph hung up the receiver, with some impatience. Still, never mind;
+if Cope would make no effort to save himself, others were making the
+effort for him. He had considerable confidence in George Pearson's
+state of mind, as well as in George's egoism and drive.
+
+Foster heard of Cope's new delinquency, through Randolph's own
+reluctant admission. "He is an ingrate, after all," said Foster
+savagely, and gave his wheels an exceptionally violent jerk. And
+Randolph made little effort, this time, toward Cope's defense.
+
+"You've done so much for him," Foster went on; "and you're willing to
+do so much more."
+
+"I _could_ do a great deal, of course. There may be a good reason this
+time, too," said Randolph soberly.
+
+"Humph!" returned Foster.
+
+Cope had hung up the receiver to turn toward Lemoyne and to say: "I
+really ought to have gone."
+
+"Wait until I can go with you," Lemoyne insisted, as he had been
+insisting just before. The still unseen man of Indian Rock was again
+the subject of his calculations.
+
+"You've been asked," Cope submitted. "He has been very friendly to me,
+and I am sure he would be the same to you."
+
+"I think that, personally, I can get along without him," the other
+muttered ungraciously to himself.
+
+Aloud he said: "As I've told you, I've got the president of the
+dramatic club to see tonight, and it's high time that I was leaving."
+He looked with intention at the desk which had superseded that old
+table, with ink-stained cover, at which Cope had once worked. "You can
+use a little time to advantage over those themes. I'll be back within
+an hour."
+
+Lemoyne had entered for Psychology, and was hoping that he now enjoyed
+the status necessary for participation in the college theatricals. But
+he was relying still more on a sudden defection or lapse which had left
+the dramatic club without a necessary actor at a critical time. "It's
+me, or postponement," he said; "and I think it's me." The new
+opportunity--or bare chance--loomed before him with immensity. Cope's
+affair might wait. He would even risk Cope's running over to Randolph's
+place alone.
+
+Cope seated himself at his desk with loyalty, or at least with
+docility; and Lemoyne, putting on his hat and coat, started out for the
+fraternity house where the president of the club was in residence.
+
+Five minutes after Lemoyne's departure Cope heard the telephone ringing
+downstairs, and presently a patient, middle-aged man knocked at the
+door and told him the call was for him.
+
+Cope sighed apprehensively and went down. Of course it was Amy. Would
+he not come over for an hour? Everybody was away, and they could have a
+quiet talk together.
+
+Cope, conscious of others in the house, replied cautiously. Lemoyne, he
+said, had gone out and left him with a deskful of themes: tiresome
+routine work, but necessary, and immensely absorptive of time. He was
+afraid that he could scarcely come this evening....
+
+Amy's voice took on a new tone. Why, she seemed to be feeling, must
+Arthur Lemoyne be mentioned, and mentioned so early? Yet Bertram had
+put him--instinctively, unconsciously--at the head of the little verbal
+procession just begun.
+
+Cope's response was dry and meagre; free speech was impossible over a
+lodging-house telephone set in the public hall. Amy, who knew little of
+Cope's immediate surroundings at the moment, went on in accents of
+protest and of grievance, and Cope went on replying in a half-hushed
+voice as non-committally as he was able. He dwelt more and more on the
+trying details of his work in words which conveyed no additional
+information to any fellow-dwellers who might overhear.
+
+"You haven't been to see me for a week," came Amy's voice petulantly,
+indignantly.
+
+"I'm very sorry, I'm sure," returned Cope in a carefully generalized
+tone of suavity. It was successful with the spinster in the side room
+above, but it was no tone to use with a protesting _fiancee_.
+
+"Why do you neglect me so?" Amy's voice proceeded, with no shade of
+appeasement.
+
+"There is no intention of that," replied Cope; "--so far as I know," he
+added, for ears about or above.
+
+Again Amy's tone changed. It took on a tang of anger, and also a
+curious ring of finality--as if, suddenly, a last resolution had been
+reached. "Good night," she said abruptly, and the interview was over.
+
+Cope forgot Randolph, and Lemoyne, and his themes. Lemoyne, returning
+within the hour, found him seated at his desk in self-absorbed
+depression, his work untouched.
+
+"Well, they've taken me," he began; "and I shall have a fairly good
+part." Cope made no effort to respond to the other's glowing
+self-satisfaction, but sat with thoughtful, downcast eyes at his desk
+before the untouched themes. "What's the matter?" asked Lemoyne. "Has
+she been calling up again?"
+
+Cope raised his head and gave him a look. Lemoyne saw that his very
+first guess had been correct.
+
+"This is a gay life!" he broke out; "just the life I have come down
+here to lead. You're making yourself miserable, and you're making me
+miserable. It's got to end."
+
+Cope gave him a second woeful glance.
+
+"Write to her, breaking it off," prompted Lemoyne. "Draft a letter
+tonight."
+
+His mind was full of _cliches_ from his reading and his "scripts." He
+had heard all the necessary things said: in fact, had said them
+himself--now in evening dress, now in hunting costume, now in the loose
+habiliments of Pierrot--time and time again. The dissatisfied _fiance_
+need but say that he could not feel, after all, that they were as well
+suited to each other as they ought to be, that he could not bring
+himself to believe that his feeling for her was what love really should
+be, and that----
+
+Thus, with a multiplicity of "that's," they accomplished a rough draft
+which might be restudied and used on the morrow. "There!" said Lemoyne
+to the weary Cope at eleven o'clock; "it ought to have been written a
+month ago."
+
+Cope languidly slipped the oft-amended sheet under his pile of themes
+and in a spent voice suggested bed.
+
+Over night and through the following forenoon the draft lay on his
+desk. When he returned to his room at three o'clock a note, which had
+been delivered by hand, awaited him. It was from Amy Leffingwell.
+
+Cope read it, folded his arms on his desk, bowed his head on his arms,
+and, being alone, gave a half-sob. Then he lifted his head, with face
+illumined and soul refreshed. Amy had asked for an end to their
+engagement.
+
+"What does she say?" asked Lemoyne, an hour later.
+
+"She says what you say!" exclaimed Cope with shining eyes and a trace
+of half-hysteric bravado. "She does not feel that we are quite so well
+suited to each other as we ought to be, nor that her feeling toward me
+is what love really... Can she have been in dramatics too!"
+
+"Your letter," returned Lemoyne, with dignity, "would have been
+understood."
+
+"Quite so," Cope acknowledged, in a kind of exultant excitation. He
+caught the rough draft from his desk--it was all seared with new
+emendations--tore it up, and threw the fragments into the waste-basket.
+"Thank Heaven, I haven't had to send it!" In a moment, "What am I to
+write now?" he asked with irony.
+
+"The next will be easier," returned Lemoyne, still with dignity.
+
+"It will," replied Cope.
+
+It was,--so much easier that it became but an elegant literary
+exercise. A few touches of nobility, a few more of elegiac regret, and
+it was ready at nine that night for the letter-box. Cope dropped it in
+with an iron clang and walked back to his quarters a free man.
+
+A few days later Lemoyne, working for his new play, met Amy Leffingwell
+in the music-alcove of the University library. She had removed her
+gloves with their furry wristlets, and he saw that she had a ring on
+the third finger of her left hand. Its scintillations made a stirring
+address to his eye.
+
+Cope heard about the ring that evening, and about Amy Leffingwell's
+engagement to George Pearson the next day.
+
+He had no desire to dramatize the scene of Pearson's advance, assault
+and victory, nor to visualize the setting up of the monument by which
+that victory was commemorated. Lemoyne did it for him.
+
+Pearson had probably indulged in some disparagement of Cope--a phase on
+which Lemoyne, as a faithful friend, did not dwell. But he clearly saw
+George taking Amy's hand, on which there was still no ring, and
+declaring that she should be wearing one before tomorrow night. He
+figured both George and Amy as rather glad that Cope had not given one,
+and as more and more inclining, with the passage of the days, to the
+comfortable feeling that there had never been any real engagement at
+all.
+
+Lemoyne attempted to put some of his visualizings before Cope, but Cope
+cut him short. "Now I will settle down to work on my thesis," he said,
+"and get my degree at the June convocation."
+
+"Good," said Lemoyne; "and now I can get my mind on the club." He went
+to the window and looked out on the night. The stars were a-glitter.
+"Let's take a turn round the block before we turn in."
+
+They spent ten minutes in the clear winter air. As Cope, on their
+return, stooped to put his latch-key to use, Lemoyne impulsively threw
+an arm across his shoulder. "Everything is all right, now," he said, in
+a tone of high gratification; and Urania, through the whole width of
+her starry firmament, looked down kindly upon a happier household.
+
+
+
+
+24
+
+_COPE IN DANGER ANEW_
+
+
+A similar satisfaction came to prevail in University circles, and in
+the lesser circle which Cope had formed outside. His own classroom,
+after a week, became a different place. There had been some disposition
+to take a facetious view of Cope's adventure. His class had felt him as
+cool and rather stiff, and comment would not be stayed. One bright girl
+thought he had spoiled a good suit of clothes for nothing. The boys,
+who knew how much clothes cost, and how much every suit counted, put
+their comment on a different basis. The more serious among them went no
+further, indeed, than to say that if a man had found himself making a
+mistake, the sooner he got out of it the better. For weeks this affair
+of Cope's had hung over the blackboard like a dim tapestry. Now it was
+gone; and when he tabulated in chalk the Elizabethan dramatists or the
+Victorian novelists there was nothing to prevent his students from
+seeing them.
+
+Medora Phillips became sympathetic and tender. She let him understand
+that she thought he had been unfairly treated. This did not prevent her
+from being much kinder to Amy Leffingwell. Amy, earlier, had been so
+affected by the general change of tone that, more than once, she had
+felt prompted to take herself and her belongings out of the house. But
+she still lingered on, as she was likely to do, during a short
+engagement; and Mrs. Phillips was now amiability itself to George and
+Amy both.
+
+Her method of soothing Cope was to take him to the theatre and the
+opera in town: he could scarcely come to the house. It was now late in
+January and the opera season was near its end. People were tiring of
+their boxes, or had started South: it had become almost a work of merit
+to fill a friend's box for her. During the last week of the season,
+Mrs. Phillips was put in position to do this. She invited Cope, and
+took along Hortense, and found in the city itself a married pair who
+could get to the place and home again without her help. Lemoyne would
+have made six, and the third man; but he was not bidden. Why pack the
+box? A better effect was made by presenting, negligently, one empty
+seat. Lemoyne dressed Cope, however. He had brought to Churchton the
+outgrown evening clothes; and Cope, in his exuberance, bought a new
+pair of light shoes and white gloves. He looked well as he sat on the
+back seat of the limousine with Medora Phillips, during the long drive
+in; and he looked well--strikingly, handsomely well--in the box itself.
+Indeed, thought Medora, he made other young men in nearby boxes--young
+men of "means" and "position"--look almost plebian. "He is charming,"
+she said to herself, over and over again.
+
+What about him "took" her? Was it his slenderness, his grace? Was it
+his youthfulness, intact to this moment and promising an extension of
+agreeable possibilities into an entertaining future? Or was it more
+largely his fundamental coolness of tone? Again he was an icicle on the
+temple--this time the temple of song. "He is glittering." said Medora,
+intent on his blazing blue eyes, his beautiful teeth ever ready for a
+public smile, and the luminous backward sweep of his hair; "and he is
+not soft." She thought suddenly of Arthur Lemoyne; he, by comparison,
+seemed like a dark, yielding plum-pudding.
+
+On the way into town Medora had had Hortense sit in front with Peter.
+This arrangement had enabled her to lay her hand more than once on
+Cope's, and to tell him again that he had been rather badly treated,
+and that Amy, when you came to it, was a poor slight child who scarcely
+knew her own mind. "I hope she has not made a mistake, after all,"
+breathed Medora.
+
+All this soothed Cope. The easy motion of the luxurious car
+half-hypnotized him; a scene of unaccustomed splendor and brilliancy
+lay just ahead... What wonder that Medora found him scenically
+gratifying in her box (the dear creature's titillation made it seem
+"hers" indeed), and gave his name with great gusto to the young woman
+of the notebook and pencil? And the box was not at the back, but well
+along to one side, where people could better see him. Its number, too,
+was lower; so that, next morning, he was well up in the list, instead
+of at the extreme bottom, where two or three of the young men of means
+and position found themselves. Some of the girls in his class read his
+name, and had no more to say about wet clothes.
+
+Hortense, on the front seat of the car, had had the good sense to say
+little and the acumen to listen much. She knew that Cope must "call"
+soon, and she knew it would be on some evening when he had been advised
+that Amy was not at home. There came, before long, an evening when Amy
+and George Pearson went into town for a musical comedy, and Cope walked
+across once more to the familiar house.
+
+Hortense was in the drawing-room. She was brilliantly dressed, and her
+dark aggressive face wore a look of bravado. In her rich contralto she
+welcomed Cope with an initiative which all but crowded her aunt into
+second place. Under the very nose of Medora Phillips, whom she breezily
+seemed to regard as a chaperon, she brought forward the sketch of Cope
+in oils, which she had done partly from observation and partly from
+memory. She may have had, too, some slight aid from a photograph,--one
+which her aunt had wheedled out of Cope and had missed, on one occasion
+at least, from her desk in the library. Hortense now boldly asked his
+cooperation for finishing her small canvas.
+
+Though the "wood-nymphs" of last autumn's legend might indeed be, as he
+had broadly said, "a nice enough lot of girls," they really were not
+all alike and indistinguishable: one of them at least, as he should
+learn, had thumbs.
+
+Hortense wheeled into action.
+
+"The composition is good," she observed, looking at the canvas as it
+stood propped against the back of a Chippendale chair; "and, in
+general, the values are all right. But----" She glanced from the sketch
+back to the subject of it.
+
+Cope started. He recognized himself readily enough. However, he had had
+no idea that self-recognition was to be one of the pleasures of his
+evening.
+
+"----but I shall need you yourself for the final touches--the ones that
+will make all the difference."
+
+"It's pretty good as it is," declared Mrs. Phillips, who, privately,
+was almost as much surprised as Cope. "When did you get to do it?"
+
+This inquiry, simple as it was, put the canvas in a new light--that of
+an icon long cherished as the object of private devotion. Hortense
+stepped forward to the chair and made an adjustment of the picture's
+position: she had a flush and a frown to conceal. "But never mind," she
+thought, as she turned the canvas toward a slightly different light;
+"if Aunt Medora wants to help, let her."
+
+She did not reply to her aunt's question. "Retouched from life, and
+then framed--who knows?" she asked. Of course it would look immensely
+better; would look, in fact, as it was meant to look, as she could make
+it look.
+
+She told Cope that she had set up a studio near the town square, not
+far from the fountain-basin and the elms----
+
+"Which won't count for much at this time of year," interjected her aunt.
+
+"Well, the light is good," returned Hortense, "and the place is quiet;
+and if Mr. Cope will drop in two or three times, I think he will end by
+feeling that I have done him justice."
+
+"This is a most kind attention," said Cope, slightly at sea. "I ought
+to be able to find time some afternoon...."
+
+"Not too late in the afternoon," Hortense cautioned. "The light in
+February goes early."
+
+When Lemoyne heard of this new project he gave Cope a _look_. He had no
+concern as to Mrs. Phillips, who was, for him, but a rather dumpy,
+over-brisk, little woman of forty-five. If she must run off with Bert
+every so often in a motor-car, he could manage to stand it. Besides, he
+had no desire to shut Cope--and himself--out of a good house. But the
+niece, scarcely twenty-three, was a more serious matter.
+
+"Look out!" he said to Cope. "Look out!"
+
+"I can take care of myself," the other replied, rather tartly.
+
+"I wish you could!" retorted Lemoyne, with poignant brevity. "I'll go
+with you."
+
+"You won't!"
+
+"I'd rather save you near the start, than have to try at the very end."
+
+Cope flung himself out; and he looked in at Hortense's studio--which
+she had taken (or borrowed) for a month--before the week was half over.
+
+Hortense had stepped into the shoes of a young gentlewoman who had been
+trying photography, and who had rather tired of it. At any rate, she
+had had a chance to go to Florida for a month and had seized it.
+Hortense had succeeded to her little north skylight, and had rearranged
+the rest to her own taste; it was a mingling of order and disorder, of
+calculation and of careless chance. She had a Victory of Samothrace and
+a green-and-gold dalmatic from some Tuscan town----But why go on?
+
+Cope had not been in this new milieu fifteen minutes before Randolph
+happened along.
+
+Randolph, as a friend of the family, could scarcely be other than
+persona grata. Hortense, however, gave him no great welcome. She
+stopped in the work that had but been begun. The winter day was none
+too bright, and the best of the light would soon be past, she said. The
+engagement could stand over. In any event, he was there ("he," of
+course, meaning Cope), and a present delay would only add to the total
+number of his calls. Hortense began to wipe her brushes and to talk of
+tea.
+
+"I'll go, I'll go," said Randolph obligingly. "I heard about the new
+shop only yesterday, and I wanted to see it. I don't exact that I shall
+witness the mysteries in active operation."
+
+Cope's glance asked Randolph to remain.
+
+"There are no mysteries," returned Hortense. "It's just putting on a
+few dabs of paint in the right places."
+
+She continued to take a few dabs from her brushes and to talk tea.
+"Stay for a sip," she said.
+
+"Very well; thank you," replied Randolph, and wondered how long "a sip"
+might mean.
+
+In the end it meant no longer for him than for Cope; they came away
+together. Hortense held Cope for a moment to make a second engagement
+at an earlier hour.
+
+Randolph had not met Cope for several days, except at the opera, where
+he had left his regular Monday evening seat in the parquet to spend a
+few moments in Mrs. Phillips' friend's box. He had never seen Cope in
+evening dress before; but he found him handsome and distinguished, and
+some of the glamour of that high occasion still lingered about the
+young man as he now walked through High Street, in his rather shabby
+tweeds, at Randolph's side.
+
+Randolph looked back upon his dinner as a complete success: Pearson was
+engaged, and Cope was free. He now said to Cope:
+
+"Of course you must know I feel you were none too handsomely treated.
+George is a pleasant, enterprising fellow, but somewhat sudden and
+rapacious. If he is happy, I hope you are no less happy yourself...."
+Thus he resumed the subject which had been dropped at the Library door.
+
+Cope shrank a little, and Randolph felt him shrinking. He fell silent;
+he understood. Pain sometimes took its own time to travel, and reached
+its goal by a slow, circuitous route. He thought suddenly of his
+bullfight in Seville, twenty-five years before. He had sat out his six
+bulls with entire composure; yet, back in America, some time later, he
+had encountered a bullfight in an early film and had not been able to
+follow it through. Cope, perhaps, was beginning to feel the edge of the
+sword and the drag at his vitals. The thing was over, and his, the
+elder man's, own part in it successfully accomplished; so why had he,
+conventional commentator, felt the need of further words?
+
+He let the unhappy matter drop. When he spoke again he reminded Cope
+that the invitation for himself and Lemoyne still held good. Amy had
+been swept from the stage; but Lemoyne, a figure of doubt, was yet in
+its background. "I must have a 'close-up'," Randolph declared to
+himself, "and find out what he comes to." Cope had shown some
+reluctance to meet his advances--a reluctance which, he felt, was not
+altogether Cope's own.
+
+"I know we shall be glad to come sometime," replied Cope, with seeming
+heartiness. This heartiness may have had its element of the genuine; at
+any rate, here was another "good house," from which no one need shut
+himself out without good cause. If Lemoyne developed too extreme a
+reluctance, he would be reminded that he was cherishing the hope of a
+position in the registrar's office, for at least half of the day; also,
+that Randolph enjoyed some standing in University circles, and that his
+brother-in-law was one of the trustees.
+
+"Yes, indeed," continued Cope, in a further corroboration which might
+better have been dispensed with.
+
+"You will be welcome," replied Randolph quietly. He would have
+preferred a single assurance to a double one.
+
+
+
+
+25
+
+_COPE IN DOUBLE DANGER_
+
+
+Meanwhile Cope and Lemoyne refined daily on the details of their new
+menage and applied themselves with new single-mindedness to their
+respective interests. Cope had found a subject for his thesis in the
+great field of English literature,--or, rather, in a narrow bypath
+which traversed one of its corners. The important thing, as he
+frequently reminded Lemoyne, was not the thesis itself, but the aid
+which it might give his future. "It will make a difference, in salary,
+of three or four hundred dollars," he declared.
+
+Lemoyne himself gave a few hours a week to Psychology in its humbler
+ranges. There were ways to hold the attention of children, and there
+were forms of advertising calculated to affect favorably the man who
+had money to spend. In addition, the University had found out that he
+could sing as well as act, and something had been said about a place
+for him in a musical play.
+
+Between-times they brought their quarters into better order; and this
+despite numerous minor disputes. The last new picture did not always
+find at once its proper place on the wall; and sometimes there were
+discussions as to whether it should be toast or rolls, and whether
+there should be eggs or not. Occasionally sharp tones and quivering
+nostrils, but commonly amity and peace.
+
+They were seen, or heard of, as going about a great deal together: to
+lectures, to restaurants, to entertainments in the city. But they went
+no longer, for the present, to Ashburn Avenue; they took their time to
+remember Randolph's repeated invitation; and there was, as yet, no
+further attendance at the studio in the Square,--for any reference to
+the unfinished portrait was likely to produce sharp tones and quivering
+nostrils indeed.
+
+Other invitations began to come to Cope,--some of them from people he
+knew but slightly. He wondered whether his swoon and his shipwreck
+really could have done so much to make him known. Sometimes when these
+cards seemed to imply but a simple form of entertainment, at a
+convenient hour of the late afternoon, he would attend. It did not
+occur to him to note that commonly Medora Phillips was present: she was
+always in "active circulation," as he put it; and there he let things
+lie.
+
+One of these entertainments was an afternoon reception of ordinary
+type, and the woman giving it had thrown a smallish library into closer
+communication with her drawing-room without troubling to reduce the
+library to order: books, pamphlets, magazines lay about in profuse
+carelessness. And it was in this library that Cope and Medora Phillips
+met.
+
+"You've been neglecting me," she said.
+
+"But how can I----?" he began.
+
+"Yes, I know," she returned generously. "But after the first of
+May--Well, he is a young man of decisiveness and believes in quick
+action." She made a whiff, accompanied by an outward and forward motion
+of the hands. She was wafting Amy Leffingwell out of her own house into
+the new home which George Pearson was preparing for her. "After
+that----"
+
+"Yes, after that, of course."
+
+Mrs. Phillips was handling unconsciously a small pamphlet which lay on
+the library table. It was a magazine of verse--a monthly which did not
+scorn poets because they happened to live in the county in which it was
+published. The table of contents was printed on the cover, and the
+names of contributors were arranged in order down the right-hand side.
+Mrs. Phillips, carelessly running her eye over it while thinking of
+other things, was suddenly aware of the name of Carolyn Thorpe.
+
+"What's this?" she asked. She ran her eye across to the other edge of
+the cover, and read, "Two Sonnets."
+
+"Well, well," she observed, and turned to the indicated page. And,
+"When in the world----?" she asked, and turned back to the cover. It
+was the latest issue of the magazine, and but a day or two old.
+
+"Carolyn in print, at last!" she exclaimed. "Why, isn't this splendid!"
+
+Then she returned to the text of the two sonnets and read the first of
+them--part of it aloud.
+
+"Well," she gasped; "this is ardent, this is outspoken!"
+
+"That's the fashion among woman poets today," returned Cope, in a
+matter-of-fact tone. "They've gone farther and farther, until they
+hardly realize how far they _have_ gone. Don't let them disturb you."
+
+Mrs. Phillips reread the closing lines of the first sonnet, and then
+ran over the second. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed; "when _I_ was a
+girl----!"
+
+"Times change."
+
+"I should say so." She looked from the magazine to Cope. "I wonder who
+'the only begetter' may be."
+
+"Is that quite fair? So many writers think it unjust--and even obtuse
+and offensive--if the thing is put on too personal a basis. It's all
+just an imagined situation, manipulated artistically...."
+
+Mrs. Phillips looked straight at him. "Bertram Cope, it's _you_!" She
+spoke with elation. These sonnets constituted a tribute. Cope, she
+knew, had never looked three times, all told, at Carolyn Thorpe; yet
+here was Carolyn saying that she...
+
+Cope dropped his eyes and slightly flushed.
+
+"I wonder if she knows it's out?" Mrs. Phillips went on swiftly. "Did
+you?"
+
+
+"I?" cried Cope, in dismay.
+
+"You were taking it all so calmly."
+
+"'Calmly'? I don't take it at all! Why should I? And why should you
+think there is any ref----?"
+
+"Because I'm so 'obtuse' and 'offensive,' I suppose. Oh, if _I_ could
+only write, or paint, or play, or something!"
+
+Cope put his hand wearily to his forehead. The arts were a curse. So
+were gifted girls. So were over-appreciative women. He wished he were
+back home, smoking a quiet cigarette with Arthur Lemoyne.
+
+Mrs. Ryder came bustling up--Mrs. Ryder, the mathematical lady who had
+given the first tea of all.
+
+"I have just heard about Carolyn's poems. What it must be to live in
+the midst of talents! And I hear that Hortense has finally taken a
+studio for her portraits."
+
+"Yes," replied Mrs. Phillips. "And she"--with a slight emphasis--"is
+doing Mr. Cope's picture,"--with another slight emphasis at the end.
+
+Cope felt a half-angry tremor run through him. He was none the less
+perturbed because Medora Phillips meant obviously no offense. Hortense
+and Carolyn were viewed as but her delegates; they were doing for her
+what she would have been glad to be able to do for herself. Clearly, in
+her mind, there was not to be another Amy.
+
+Well, that was something, he thought. He laughed uneasily, and gave the
+enthusiastic Mrs. Ryder a few details of the art-world (as she called
+it),--details which she would not be denied.
+
+"I must call on dear Hortense, some afternoon," she said.
+
+"Do," returned Hortense's aunt. "And mention the place. Let's keep the
+dear girl as busy as possible."
+
+"If it were only photographs...." submitted Mrs. Ryder.
+
+"That's a career too," Mrs. Phillips acknowledged.
+
+They all drifted out into the larger room. Mrs. Ryder left
+them,--perhaps to distribute her small change of art and literature
+through the crowd.
+
+"You're not forgetting Hortense?" Mrs. Phillips herself said, before
+leaving him.
+
+"By no means," Cope replied.
+
+"I hear you didn't make much of a start."
+
+"We had tea," returned Cope, with satirical intention.
+
+This left Medora Phillips unscathed. "Tea puts on no paint," she
+observed, and was lost in the press.
+
+It need not be assumed that knowledge of Carolyn Thorpe's verse gained
+wide currency through University circles, but there was a copy of the
+magazine in the University library. Lemoyne saw it there. He scarcely
+knew whether to be pleased or vexed. Finally he decided that there was
+safety in numbers. If Cope really intended to go to that studio, it was
+just as well that there should be an impassioned poetess in the
+background. And it was just as well that Cope should know she was
+there. Lemoyne took a line not unlike Mrs. Phillips' own.
+
+"I only wish there were more of them," he declared, looking up from his
+desk. "I'd like a lady barber for your head, a lady shoemaker for your
+feet, a lady psychologist for your soul----"
+
+"Stop it!" cried Cope. "I've had about all I can stand. If you want to
+live in peace, as you sometimes say, do your share to keep the peace."
+
+"You _are_ going to have another sitting?"
+
+"I am. How can I get out of it?"
+
+"You don't want to get out of it."
+
+"Well, after all the attentions they've shown us----"
+
+"Us? You."
+
+"Me, then. Shall I be so uncivil as to hold back?"
+
+"It might not displease her if you did."
+
+"Her?"
+
+"Your Mrs. Phillips. If I may risk a guess------"
+
+"You may not. Your precious 'psychology' can wait. Don't be in such a
+damned hurry to use it."
+
+"It had better be used in time."
+
+"It had better not be used at all. Drop it. Think about your new play,
+or something."
+
+"Oh, the devil!" sighed Lemoyne. "Winnebago seems mighty far off. We
+got on there, at least." He bent again over his desk.
+
+Cope put down his book and came across. There were tears, perhaps, in
+his eyes--the moisture of vexation, or of contrition, or of both. "We
+can get along here, too," he said, with an arm around Lemoyne's
+shoulder.
+
+"Let's hope so," returned Lemoyne, softening, with his hand pressed on
+Cope's own.
+
+
+
+
+26
+
+_COPE AS A GO-BETWEEN_
+
+
+This brief exchange might have passed for a quarrel and a
+reconciliation; and the reconciliation seemed to call for a seal. That
+was soon set by another of Randolph's patient invitations to dinner.
+
+"Let's go," said Cope; "I've got to go again--sometime."
+
+"I don't care about it, very much," replied Lemoyne.
+
+"If you want any help of his toward a position.... Time's passing. And
+a man can't be expected to bestir himself much for another man he's
+never even seen."
+
+"All right. I'll go with you."
+
+Randolph was glad to see Cope again, whom he had not met since the half
+hour in Hortense Dunton's studio. He was also glad to secure, finally,
+a close and leisurely look at Lemoyne. Lemoyne took the same occasion
+for a close and leisurely look at Randolph. Each viewed the other with
+dislike and distrust. Each spoke, so far as might be, to Cope--or
+through him. Sing-Lo, who was prepared to smile, saw few smiles
+elsewhere, and became sedate, even glum.
+
+Randolph felt a physical distaste for Lemoyne. His dark eyes were too
+liquid; his person was too plump; the bit of black bristle beneath his
+nose was an offense; his aura----Yet who can say anything definite
+about so indefinite a thing as an aura, save that one feels it and is
+attracted or repelled by it? Lemoyne, on his side, developed an equal
+distaste (or repugnance) for the "little gray man"--as he called
+Randolph to himself and, later, even to Cope; though Randolph, speaking
+justly, was exactly neither gray nor little. Lemoyne noted, too, the
+early banishment of Randolph's eyeglasses, which disappeared as they
+had disappeared once or twice before. He felt that Randolph was trying
+to stay young rather late, and was showing himself inclined to "go"
+with younger men longer than they would welcome him. Why didn't he
+consort with people of his own age and kind? He was old; so why
+couldn't he _be_ old?
+
+The talk led--through Cope--to reminiscences of life in Winnebago.
+Randolph presently began to feel Lemoyne as a variously yet equivocally
+gifted young fellow--one so curiously endowed as to be of no use to his
+own people, and of no avail for any career they were able to offer him.
+A bundle of minor talents; a possible delight to casual acquaintances,
+but an exasperation to his own household; an ornamental skimmer over
+life's surfaces, when not a false fire for other young voyagers along
+life's coasts. Yet Bertram Cope admired him and had become absorbed in
+him. Their life in that northern town, with its fringe of
+interests--educational, ecclesiastical, artistic and aquatic--had been
+intimate, fused to a degree. Randolph began to realize, for the first
+time, the difficulties in the way of "cultivating" Cope. Cope was a
+field already occupied, a niche already filled.
+
+While Randolph was gathering (through Cope) details of the life in
+Winnebago, Lemoyne was gathering (through Cope) details of the life in
+Churchton during the past autumn. He began to reconstruct that season:
+the long range of social entertainments, the proposed fall excursions,
+the sudden shifting of domicile. Randolph, it was clear, had tried to
+appropriate Cope and to supplant (knowingly or unknowingly) Cope's
+closest friend. Lemoyne became impatient over the fact that he was now
+sitting at Randolph's table. However, if Randolph could help him to a
+place and a salary, that would make some amends.
+
+Presently Cope, having served as an intermediary, became the open
+centre of interest. His thesis was brought forward as a suitable
+subject of inquiry and comment. It was a relief to have come to a final
+decision; but no relief was in sight for a long time from the slavery
+of close reading. Every moment that could be spared from his classroom
+was given up to books--authors in whom he might be interested or not
+interested, but who must be gone through.
+
+"A sort of academic convention," said Cope, rather wanly; "but a
+necessary one."
+
+His eyes had begun to show excessive application; at least they looked
+tired and dim. His color, too, was paler. He had come to suggest again
+the young man who had been picked up from Medora Phillips' dining-room
+floor and laid out on the couch in her library, and who had shown a
+good deal of pallor during the few days that followed. "Take a little
+more air and exercise," Randolph counselled.
+
+"A good rule always, for everybody," said Lemoyne, with a withholding
+of all tone and expression.
+
+"I believe," Randolph continued, "that you are losing in both weight
+and color. That would be no advantage to yourself--and it might
+complicate Miss Dunton's problem. It's perplexing to an artist when
+one's subject changes under one's very eye."
+
+"There won't be much time for sitting, from now on," observed Lemoyne
+concisely.
+
+"I might try to go round once more," said Cope, "--in fairness. If
+there are to be higher lights on my cheekbones and lower lights for my
+eyes, an hour or so should serve to settle it."
+
+"I wouldn't introduce many changes into my eyes and cheekbones, if I
+were you," said Randolph. Lemoyne was displeased; he thought that
+Randolph was taking advantage of his position as host to make an
+observation of unwarranted saliency, and he frowned at his plate.
+
+Cope flushed, and looked at his.
+
+The talk drifted toward dramatics, with Winnebago once more the
+background; but the foreground was occupied by a new musical comedy
+which one of the clubs might try in another month, and the tone became
+more cheery. Sing-Lo, who had come in with a maple mousse of his own
+making, smiled at last; and he smiled still more widely when, at the
+end of the course, his chief occidental masterpiece was praised.
+Sing-Lo also provided coffee and cigars in the den; and it was here
+that Cope felt the atmosphere right for venturing a word in behalf of
+Lemoyne. There had been few signs of relenting in Winnebago; and some
+modest source of income would be welcome--in fact, was almost necessary.
+
+"Of course work _is_ increasing in the offices," said Randolph, looking
+from one young man to the other; "and of course I have, directly or
+indirectly, some slight 'influence.'"
+
+He felt no promptings to lend Lemoyne a hand; yet Cope himself, even if
+out of reach, might at least remain an object of continuing kindness.
+
+"But if you are to interest yourself in some new undertaking by 'The
+Grayfriars,'" he said to Lemoyne, "will you have much time and
+attention to give to office-work?"
+
+"Oh, I have time," replied Lemoyne jauntily, "and not many studies.
+Half a day of routine work, I thought.... Of course I'm not a manager,
+or director, or anything like that. I should just have a part of
+moderate importance, and should have only to give good heed to
+rehearsals...."
+
+"Well," said Randolph thoughtfully.
+
+"I hope you can do something," put in Cope, with fervor.
+
+"Well," said Randolph again.
+
+This uncomfortable and unsatisfactory dinner of three presently drew to
+its end. "I'd have made it four," said Randolph to Foster, a day or two
+later, "if I'd only thought of it in time."
+
+"_I_ don't want to meet them again," returned Foster quickly.
+
+"Well," said Randolph, "I've no fondness for the new fellow, myself;
+but----"
+
+"And I don't care about the other, either."
+
+Randolph sighed. This was plainly one of Foster's off days. The only
+wonder was he had not more of them. He sat in darkness, with few
+diversions, occupations, ameliorations. His mind churned mightily on
+the scanty materials that came his way. He founded big guesses on
+nothings; he raised vast speculative edifices on the slightest of
+premises. To dislike a man he could not even see! Well, the blind--and
+the half-blind--had their own intuitions and followed their own
+procedures.
+
+"Then you wouldn't advise me to speak a word for him?--for them?"
+
+"Certainly not!" rejoined Foster, with all promptness. "They've treated
+you badly. They've put you off; and they came, finally, only because
+they counted on getting something out of you.
+
+"Oh, I wouldn't say that of Cope."
+
+"I would. And I do. They're completely wrapped up in their own
+interests, and in each other; and they're coupled to get anything they
+can out of Number Three. Or out of Number Four. Or Five. Or out of
+X,--the world, that is to say."
+
+Randolph shrugged. This was one of Foster's bad days indeed.
+
+"And what's this I hear about Hortense?" asked Foster, with bitterness.
+
+"That won't amount to much."
+
+"It won't? She's out in the open, finally. She took that place for a
+month with one express object--to get him there, paint or no paint.
+She's fretful and cantankerous over every day of delay, and soon she'll
+be in an undisguised rage."
+
+"What does her aunt say to it?"
+
+"She's beginning to be vexed. She's losing patience. She thinks it's a
+mistake--and an immodest one. She wants to send her away for a visit.
+To think of it!--as soon as one girl lets go another takes hold,--and a
+third person holds on through all!"
+
+"Joe! Joe!"
+
+But Foster was not to be stayed.
+
+"And that poetry of Carolyn's! Medora herself came up and read it to
+me. It was a 'tribute,' she thought!"
+
+"That won't amount to anything at all."
+
+"It won't? With Hortense scornfully ridiculing it, and Carolyn bursting
+into tears before she can make her bolt from the room, and Amy
+wondering whether, after all...! If things are as bad as they are for
+me up here, how much worse must they be for the rest of them below! And
+that confounded engagement has made it still worse all round!"
+
+Randolph ran his palms over his perplexed temples. "Whose?"
+
+"Whose? No wonder you ask! Engagements, then."
+
+"When are they going to be married?"
+
+"The first week in May, I hear. But Pearson is trying for the middle of
+April. His flat is taken." Foster writhed in his chair.
+
+"Why do they care for him?" he burst out. "He's nothing in himself. And
+he cares nothing for them. And he cares nothing for you," Foster added
+boldly. "All he has thought for is that fellow from up north."
+
+"Don't ask me why they care," replied Randolph, with studied sobriety.
+"Why does anybody care? And for what? For the thing that is just out of
+reach. He's cool; he's selfish; he's indifferent. Yet, somehow, frost
+and fire join end to end and make the circle complete." He fell into
+reflection. "It's all like children straining upward for an icicle, and
+presently slipping, with cracked pates, on the ice below."
+
+"Well, _my_ pate isn't cracked."
+
+"Unless it's the worst cracked of all."
+
+Foster tore off his shade and threw it on the floor. "Mine?" he cried.
+"Look to your own!"
+
+"Joe!" said Randolph, rising. "That won't quite do!"
+
+"Be a fool along with the others, if you will!" retorted Foster. "Oh!"
+he went on, "Haven't I seen it all? Haven't I felt it all? You, Basil
+Randolph, mind your own ways too!"
+
+Randolph thought of words, but held his tongue. Words led to other
+words, and he might soon find himself involved in what would seem like
+a defense--an attitude which he did not relish, a course of which he
+did not acknowledge the need. "Poor Joe!" he thought; "sitting too much
+by himself and following over-closely the art of putting things
+together--anyhow!" Joe Foster must have more company and different
+things to consider. What large standard work--what history, biography,
+or bulky mass of memoirs in from four to eight volumes--would be the
+best to begin on before the winter should be too far spent?
+
+Four or five days later, Randolph wrote to Cope that there was a good
+prospect for a small position in the administration offices of the
+University, and a week later Lemoyne was in that position. Cope, who
+recognized Randolph's handling of the matter as a personal favor,
+replied in a tone of some warmth. "He's really a very decent fellow,
+after all,--of course he is," pronounced Randolph. Lemoyne himself
+wrote more tardily and more coolly. He was taking time from his
+Psychology and from "The Antics of Annabella," it appeared, to acquaint
+himself with the routine of his new position. Randolph shrugged: he
+must wait to see which of the three interests would be held the most
+important.
+
+
+
+
+27
+
+_COPE ESCAPES A SNARE_
+
+
+Lemoyne's first week in his new berth held him rather close, and Cope
+was able to move about with less need of accounting for his every hour.
+One of his first concerns was to get over his sitting with Hortense
+Dunton. His "sitting," he said: it was to be the first, the only and
+the last.
+
+He came into her place with a show of confidence, a kind of blustery
+bonhomie. "I give you an hour from my treadmill," he declared brightly.
+"So many books, and such dry ones!"
+
+Hortense, who had been moping, brightened too. "I thought you had
+forgotten me," she said chidingly. Yet her tone had less acerbity than
+that which she had employed, but a few moments before, to address him
+in his absence. For she often had in mind, at intervals longer or
+shorter, Cope's improvisation about the Sassafras--too truly that
+dense-minded shrub had failed to understand the "young ladies" and
+their "needs."
+
+"My thesis," he said. "From now on, it must take a lot of my thought
+and every moment of my spare time." He looked at the waiting canvas.
+"Clinch it to-day. Hurry it through."
+
+He spoke with a factitious vivacity which almost gave a sense of chill.
+She looked at him with a shade of dissatisfaction and discomfort.
+
+"What! must it all be done in a drive?" she asked.
+
+"By no means. Watch me relax. Is that my chair? See me drop into
+complete physical and mental passivity--the _kef_ of the Arabs."
+
+He mounted the model-throne, sank into the wide chair, and placed his
+hands luxuriously on its arms. His general pose mattered little: she
+had not gone beyond his head and shoulders.
+
+Hortense stared. Would he push her on the moment into the right mood?
+Would he have her call into instant readiness her colors and brushes?
+Why, even a modest amateur must be allowed her minutes of preparation
+and approach.
+
+"Passivity?" she repeated, beginning to get under way. "Shall I find
+you very entertaining in that condition?"
+
+"Entertaining? Me, the sitter? Why, I've always heard it was an
+important part of a portrait-painter's work to keep the subject
+interested and amused."
+
+He smiled in his cold, distant way. The north light cut across the
+forehead, nose and chin which made his priceless profile. The canvas
+itself, done on theory in a lesser light, looked dull and lifeless.
+
+Hortense felt this herself. She did not see how she was going to key it
+up in a single hour. As she considered among her brushes and tubes, she
+began to feel nervous, and her temper stirred.
+
+"You have a great capacity for being interested and amused," she said.
+"Most men are like you. Especially young ones. They are amused,
+diverted, entertained--and there it ends."
+
+Cope felt the prick. "Well, we are bidden," he said; "and we come. Too
+many of us have little to offer in return, except appreciation and
+goodwill. How better appreciate such kindness as Mrs. Phillips' than by
+gratefully accepting more of it?" (Stilted copy-book talk; and he knew
+it.)
+
+"You haven't been accepting much of it lately," she returned, feeling
+the point of a new brush. She spoke with the consciousness of empty
+evenings that might have been full.
+
+"Hardly," he replied. And he felt that this one word sufficed.
+
+"Well, the coast will be clear after the twentieth of April."
+
+"That is the date, then, is it?" The more he thought of the impending
+ceremony, the more grateful he was for his escape. Thankfulness had
+salved the earlier wound; no pain now came from his touching it.
+
+"Yes; on that day the house will see the last of them."
+
+"The wedding, then, will----?"
+
+"Yes. Aunt Medora says, 'Why go to Iowa?--you're at home here.' Why,
+indeed, drag George away out to Fort Lodge? Let her own people, who are
+not many, come to us. Aunt will do everything, and do it handsomely."
+
+She slanted her palette and looked toward the skylight. Cope's own
+glance swept non-committally the green burlap walls. Both of them were
+seeing pictures of the wedding preparations. Hortense saw delivery-boys
+at the front door, with things that must be held to the light or draped
+over chairs. She saw George haling Amy to the furniture-shops and to
+the dealers in wall-paper. She saw them in cosy shaded confab evening
+after evening, in her aunt's library. It was a period of joy, of
+self-absorption, of unsettlement, of longing, of irritation, of
+exasperation--oh, would it never end! Cope saw a long string of gifts
+and entertainments, a diamond engagement-ring, a lavishly-furnished
+apartment ... How in the world could he himself have compassed all
+this? And how blessed was he among men that he had not been obliged to
+try!
+
+Hortense went through some motions with her brush, yet seemed to be
+looking beyond him rather than at him.
+
+"There will be a bridal-trip of a week or so," she concluded; "and they
+will be in their new home on the first of May."
+
+"Very good," said Cope. He thought he was thinking to himself, but he
+spoke aloud. "And that ends it." This last he really did say to himself.
+
+He sank more comfortably into his chair, kept his face properly
+immobile, and spoke no further word. Hortense brought back her gaze to
+focus and worked on for a little time in silence. The light was good,
+her palette was full, her brushes were well-chosen, her eyes were
+intent on his face. It was a handsome face, displayed to the best
+advantage. She might look as long as she liked, and a long look
+preceded every stroke.
+
+Presently she paused, opening her eyes wider and holding aloft her
+brush. "There will be a bride's-maid," she said.
+
+"The deuce!" he thought. "That didn't end it!" But he said nothing
+aloud.
+
+"Guess who!"
+
+"Why, how should _I_----?"
+
+"Guess!" she cried peremptorily, in a tone of bitter derision. "You
+won't? Well, it's Carolyn--our poor, silly Carolyn! And what do you
+suppose she has started in to do? She is writing an epitha--an
+epithal----"
+
+"----amium," contributed Cope. "An epithala-mium."
+
+"Yes, an epithala-mium!" repeated Hortense, with an outburst of jarring
+laughter. "Isn't she absurd! Isn't she ridiculous!"
+
+"Is she? Why, it seems to me a delicate attention, a very sweet
+thought." If Carolyn could make anything out of Amy--and of
+George--why, let her do it.
+
+"You _like_ her poetry!" cried Hortense in a high, strained voice. "You
+enjoy her epithalamiums, and her--sonnets...."
+
+Cope flushed and began to grow impatient. "She is a sweet girl," he
+said; "and if she wishes to write verse she is quite within her rights."
+
+"'Sweet'! There you go again! 'Sweet'--twice. She ought to know!"
+
+"Perhaps she does know. Everybody else knows."
+
+"And perhaps she doesn't!" cried Hortense. "Tell her! Tell her!"
+
+Cope stared. "She is a sweet girl," he repeated; "and she has been
+filling very discreetly a somewhat difficult position----"
+
+He knew something of the suppressed bitterness which, in subordinate
+places, was often the lot of the pen. He found himself preferring, just
+here, "pen" to "typewriter": he would give Carolyn a touch of
+idealization--though she had afflicted him with a heavy stroke of
+embarrassment.
+
+"'Difficult position'?" shrilled Hortense. "With Aunt Medora the very
+soul of kindness? I like that! Well, if you want to rescue her from her
+difficult position, do it. If you admire her--and love her--tell her
+so! _She'll_ be grateful--just read those sonnets over again!"
+
+Hortense dropped her palette and brushes and burst into outrageous
+tears.
+
+Cope sat bolt upright in that spacious chair. "Tell her? I have nothing
+to tell her. I have nothing to tell anyone!"
+
+His resonant words cut the air. They uttered decision. He did not mean
+to make the same mistake twice.
+
+Hortense drew across her eyes an apron redolent of turpentine and
+stepped toward the throne.
+
+"Nothing? Why this sudden refuge in silence?" she asked, almost
+truculently, even if tremulously. "You usually find enough words--even
+though they mean little."
+
+"I'm afraid I do," he admitted cautiously.
+
+"You have nothing to tell anyone? Nothing to tell--me?"
+
+Cope rose. "Nothing to tell anyone," he repeated. "Nothing."
+
+"Then let me tell you something." There was an angry thrill in her
+voice. "For I am not so selfish and cold-hearted as you are. I have
+seen nobody but you all these months. I have never tried harder to
+please anybody. You have scarcely noticed me--you have never given me a
+glance or a thought. You could interest yourself in that silly Amy and
+in our foolish Carolyn; but for me--me--Nothing!"
+
+Cope came down from the throne. If she had lavished her maiden thoughts
+on him, by day or evening or at night, he had not known and could
+hardly be supposed to know. Indeed, she had begun by treating him with
+a cursory roughness; nor had he noticed any great softening later on.
+
+"Listen," he said. Under the stress of embarrassment and alarm his cold
+blue eyes grew colder and his delicate nostrils quivered with an effect
+a little too like disdain. "I like you as well as another; no more, no
+less. I am in no position to think of love and marriage, and I have no
+inclination that way. I am willing to be friends with everybody, and
+nothing more with anybody." The sentences came with the cruel
+detachment of bullets; but, "Not again, not twice," was his uppermost
+thought. Any bluntness, any ruggedness, rather than another month like
+that of the past holiday season.
+
+He took a step away and looked to one side, toward the couch where his
+hat and coat were lying.
+
+"Go, if you will," she said. "And go as soon as you like. You are a
+contemptible, cold-hearted ingrate. You have grudged me every minute of
+your company, everywhere--and every second you have given me here. If I
+have been foolish it is over now, and there shall be nothing to record
+my folly." She stepped to the easel and hurled the canvas to the floor,
+where it lay with palette and brushes.
+
+Cope stood with his hat in his hand and his coat over his arm. He
+seemed to see the open volume of some "printed play." After all, there
+was a type which, even under emotional stress, gave a measure of
+instinctive heed to structure and cadence. Well, if there was relief
+for her in words, he could stand to hear her speak for a moment or two
+more, not longer.
+
+"One word yet," she said in a panting voice. "Your Arthur Lemoyne. That
+preposterous friendship cannot go on for long. You will tire of him; or
+more likely he will tire of you. Something different, something better
+will be needed,--and you will live to learn so. I should be glad if I
+never saw either one of you again!"
+
+She turned her stormy face away, and Cope slipped out with a blended
+sense of mortification, pain and relief.
+
+
+
+
+28
+
+_COPE ABSENT FROM A WEDDING_
+
+
+Cope went out on the square with his being a-tingle. If Hortense, on
+another occasion, had thrown a dash of brine, on this occasion she had
+rubbed in the salt itself. And he had struck a harsh blow in turn; the
+flat of his mind was still stinging, as if half the shock of the blow
+had remained behind. "But it was no time for half-measures," he
+muttered to himself. "Not again; not twice!" he repeated.
+
+Hortense remained for several days in a condition of sullen anger--she
+was a cloud lit up by occasional unaccountable flashes of temper.
+"Whatever in the world is the matter with her?" asked her aunt in more
+directions than one. And Amy Leffingwell, blissfully busy over her
+little trousseau and her selection of china-patterns, protested and
+opened wide, inquiring blue eyes against the intrusion of such a spirit
+at such a joyous time.
+
+But Hortense, though better days intervened now and then, did not
+improve essentially; and she contrived at the climacteric moment of
+Amy's career to make herself felt--unduly felt--after all.
+
+The wedding took place during the latter half of April, as demanded by
+the enterprising wooer. Then there would be a rapid ten-day
+wedding-journey, followed by a prompt, business-like occupancy of the
+new apartment on the first of May exactly.
+
+Pearson's parents prepared to welcome Amy handsomely; and her own
+people--some of them--came on from Iowa to attend the ceremony. There
+was her mother, who had been rather disconcerted by the sudden shift,
+but who was satisfied with George Pearson the moment she saw him, and
+who found him even more vivid and agreeable than Amy's photograph of
+him had led her to expect. There was the aunt, who had lived a bare,
+starved life, and who luxuriated, along with her sister, in the
+splendor of the Louis Quinze chamber. And there was a friendly,
+wide-awake brother of fourteen who was tucked away in the chintz room
+up stairs, whence he issued to fraternize in the ball-room with Joe
+Foster, whose exacerbated spirit he did much to soothe.
+
+This young brother was alert, cheery, chatty. He was not at all put out
+by Foster's wheeled chair and eyeshade, nor by the strange contortions
+which Foster went through when, on occasion, he left the chair for a
+couch or for some chair of ordinary type. He got behind the wheels, and
+together they made the tour of the landscapes, marines, and
+genre-pieces which covered the walls. The boy was sympathetic, without
+being obtrusively so, and his comments on the paintings were confident
+and unconventional. "So different from _ce cher_ Pelouse," said Foster,
+with a grimace. He enjoyed immensely the fragmental half-hours given
+him through those two days. His young companion was lavish in his
+reports on life's vast vicissitudes at Fort Lodge, and was always ready
+with comparisons between things as observed in his home town and in
+Churchton itself. He came as a tonic breeze; and the evening after he
+departed, Foster, left moping alone in the let-down which followed the
+festivities, said to himself more than once, "If I had had a boy, I
+should have wanted him just like Dick."
+
+Dick's mother and aunt stood up as well as they could against the
+bustling, emphatic geniality of Medora Phillips; and they were able,
+after a little, to adjust themselves to the prosperity of the Pearsons.
+These, they came to feel, were essentially of the same origin and
+traditions as themselves: just plain people who, however, had settled
+on the edge of the Big Town to make money and had made it. Pearson the
+elder was hardly more prepotent than Mr. Lusk, the banker at home.
+George himself was a dashing go-ahead: if he turned into a tired
+business-man his wife would know how to divert him.
+
+Medora Phillips provided rice. Also she satisfied herself as to where,
+if the newer taste were not too delicate, she could put her hand on an
+old shoe. She was happy to have married off Amy; she would be still
+happier once Amy got away. More room would be left for other young
+people. By "other young people" she meant, of course, certain young
+men. By "certain young men" she thought she meant Cope and Lemoyne. Of
+course she meant Cope only.
+
+"If Carolyn keeps amiable and if Hortense contrives to regain her
+good-nature, we may have some pleasant days yet," she mused.
+
+But Hortense did not regain her good-nature; she did not even maintain
+her self-control. In the end, the ceremony was too much for her. George
+and Amy had plighted their troth in a floral bower, which ordinarily
+was a bay window, before a minister of a denomination which did not
+countenance robes nor a ritual lifted beyond the chances of wayward
+improvisation; and after a brief reception the new couple prepared for
+the motor-car dash which was to take them to a late train. In the big
+wide hallway, after Amy had kissed Carolyn and thanked her for her poem
+and was preparing for the shower of rice which she had every reason to
+think she must face, there was a burst of hysterical laughter from
+somewhere behind, and Hortense Dunton, to the sufficing words, "O
+Bertram, Bertram!" emitted with sufficing clearness, fainted away.
+
+Her words, if not heard by all the company, were heard by a few to whom
+they mattered; and while Hortense, immediately after the departure of
+the happy pair, was being revived and led away, they left occasion for
+thought. Carolyn Thorpe cast a startled glance. The aunt from Iowa, who
+knew that Bertrams did not grow on every bush, and whose senses the
+function had preternaturally sharpened for any address from Romance,
+seized and shook her sister's arm; and, later on, in a Louis Quinze
+_causeuse_, up stairs, they agreed that if young Cope really had had
+another claimant on his attention, it was all the better that their Amy
+had ended by taking George. And Medora Phillips, in the front hall
+itself----
+
+Well, to Medora Phillips, in the front hall, much was revealed as in a
+lightning-flash, and the revelation was far from agreeable. What
+advantage in Amy's departure if Hortense continued to cumber the
+ground? Hortense must go off somewhere, for a sojourn of a month or
+more, to recover her health and spirits and to let the house recover
+its accustomed tone of cheer.
+
+Medora forced these considerations to the back of her mind and saw most
+of her guests out of the house. Toward the end of it all she found
+herself relaxing in the library, with Basil Randolph in the opposite
+chair. Randolph himself had figured in the ceremony. This had been a
+crude imitation of a time-hallowed form and had allowed for an
+extemporaneous prayer and for a brief address to the young couple; but
+it had retained the familiar inquiry, "Who giveth--?" "Who _can_ give?"
+asked Medora of Amy. Poor Joe was rather out of the question, and
+Brother Dick was four or five years too young. Was there, then, anyone
+really available except that kind Mr. Randolph? So Basil Randolph,
+after remembering Amy with a rich and handsome present, had taken on a
+paternal air, had stepped forward at the right moment, and was now
+recovering from his novel experience.
+
+The two, as they sat there, said little, though they looked at each
+other with half-veiled, questioning glances. Medora, indeed, improvised
+a little stretch of silent dialogue, and it made him take his share.
+She felt dislocated, almost defeated. Hortense's performance had set
+her to thinking of Bertram Cope, and she figured the same topic as
+uppermost in the mind of Basil Randolph.
+
+"Well, you have about beaten me," she said.
+
+"How so?" she made him ask, with an affectation of simplicity.
+
+"You know well enough," she returned. "You have played off the whole
+University against my poor house, and you have won. Your influence with
+the president, your brother on the board of trustees ... If Bertram
+Cope has any gratitude in his composition...."
+
+"Oh, well," she let him say, "I don't feel that I did much; and I'm not
+sure I'm glad for what I did do."
+
+"You may regret it, of course. That other man is an uncertain quantity."
+
+"Oh, come," he said; "you've had the inside track from the very start:
+this house and everything in it...."
+
+"You have a house of your own, now."
+
+"Your dinners and entertainments...."
+
+"You have your own dinner-table."
+
+"Your limousine, your chauffeur,--running to the opera and heaven knows
+where else...."
+
+"Taxis can always be had. Yes," she went on, "you have held the
+advantage over a poor woman cooped up in her own house. While I have
+had to stick here, attending to my housekeeping, you have been
+careering about everywhere,--you with a lot of partners and clerks in
+your office, and no compulsion to look in more than two or three times
+a week. Of _course_ you can run to theatres and clubs. I wonder they
+don't dispense with you altogether!"
+
+"There's the advantage of a business arranged to run itself--so far as
+_I_ am concerned."
+
+"Yes, you have had the world to range through: shows and restaurants;
+the whole big city; strolls and excursions, and who knows what
+beside...."
+
+Thus Medora Phillips continued silently, and with no exact sense of
+justice, to work up her grievance. Presently she surprised Randolph
+with a positive frown. She had made a quick, darting return to Hortense.
+
+"I shall send her away," she said aloud. The girl might join her studio
+friend, who had stopped at Asheville on her way North, and stay with
+her for a few weeks. Yes, Hortense might go and meet the spring--or
+even the summer, if that must be. The spring here in town she herself
+would take as it came. "I shall welcome a few free, easy breaths after
+this past fortnight," she finished audibly.
+
+Randolph squared himself with her mood as best he could. "You are tired
+and nervous," he said with banality. "Get the last of us out and go to
+bed. I'll lead the way, and will give these loiterers as marked an
+example as possible."
+
+Medora Phillips hushed down her house finally and went thoughtfully up
+stairs to her room. Amy had gone off, and Hortense was sentenced to go.
+There remained only Carolyn. Was there any threat in her and her
+sonnets?
+
+
+29
+
+_COPE AGAIN IN THE COUNTRY_
+
+
+Medora treated Hortense to a few cautious soundings, decided that
+another locale was the thing to do her good, and sent her South
+forthwith.
+
+"It's a low latitude," she said to herself; "but it's a high altitude.
+The season is late, but she won't suffer."
+
+Hortense, who had been sullen and fractious, met her aunt half-way, and
+agreed passively when Medora said:
+
+"It will benefit you to see the spring come on in a new scene and in a
+new fashion. You will find the mountains more interesting than the
+dunes." So Hortense packed her things and joined her friend for a brief
+sojourn in sight of the Great Smokies.
+
+Thus, when Medora herself went forth to meet the spring among the
+sand-hills, she had only Carolyn and the other members of her domestic
+staff. Yet no simplest week-end without a guest or so, and she asked
+Cope to accompany them.
+
+"You need it," she told him bluntly; "--you need a change, however
+slight and brief. You are positively thin. You make me wish that
+thesises----"
+
+"Theses," Cope corrected her, rather spiritlessly.
+
+"----that theses, then, had never been invented. To speak familiarly,
+you are almost 'peakèd.'"
+
+Cope, with the first warm days, had gone back to the blue serge suit of
+the past autumn, and he filled it even less well than before. And his
+face was thin to correspond.
+
+"Besides," she went on, "we need you. It will be a kind of camping-out
+for a day or two--merely that. We must have your help to pitch the
+tent, so to speak, and to pick up firewood, and to fry the bacon....
+And this time," she added, "you shall not have that long tiresome trip
+by train. There will be room in the car."
+
+She did not attempt to make room for Lemoyne. She was glad to have no
+need to do so; Lemoyne was deeply engrossed otherwise--"Annabella" and
+her "antics" were almost ready for the public eye. The first of May
+would see the performance, and the numerous rehearsals were exacting,
+whether as regarded the effort demanded or the time. Every spare hour
+was going into them, as well as many an hour that could hardly be
+spared. Lemoyne, who had been cast originally for a minor female part,
+now found himself transferred, through the failure of a principal, to a
+more important one. For him, then, rehearsals were more exigent than
+ever. He cut his Psychology once or twice, nor could he succeed, during
+office hours, in keeping his mind on office-routine. His superiors
+became impatient and then protestant. The annual spring dislocation of
+ordered student life was indeed a regular feature of the year's last
+term; yet to push indulgence as far as Arthur Lemoyne was pushing
+it----!
+
+Cope was concerned; then worried. "Arthur," he said, "be reasonable
+about this. You've got real work to do, remember."
+
+But Lemoyne's real work was in the musical comedy. "This is the biggest
+chance I've ever had in my life," he declared, "and I don't want to
+lose out on it."
+
+So Cope rolled away to the dunes and left Lemoyne behind for one
+Saturday night rehearsal the more.
+
+Duneland gave him a tonic welcome. Under a breezy sky the far edge of
+the lake stood out clear. Along its nearer edge the vivacious waves
+tumbled noisily. The steady pines were welcoming the fresh early
+foliage of such companions as dressed and undressed in accord with the
+calendar; the wrecked trunks which had given up life and its leafy
+pomps seemed somehow less sombre and stark; and in the threatened
+woodlands behind the hills a multiplicity of small new greeneries
+stirred the autumn's dead leaves and brightened up the thickets of
+shrubbery. The arbutus had companioned the hepatica, and the squads of
+the lupines were busily preparing their panoply of lavender-blue
+racemes. Nature was breaking bounds. On the inland horizon rose the
+vast bulk of the prison. As on other excursions, nobody tried too hard
+to see it.
+
+"It's all too lovely," exclaimed Medora Phillips. "And what is quite as
+good," she was able to declare, "the house itself is all right." Winter
+had not weakened its roof nor wrenched away its storm-windows; no
+irresponsible wayfarer had used it for a lodging, nor had any casual
+marauder entered to despoil. Medora directed the disposition of the
+hamper of food with a relieved air and sent Cope down with Peter for an
+armful or two of driftwood from the assertive shore.
+
+"And you, Carolyn," she said, "see if the oil-stove will really go."
+
+Down on the beach itself, where the past winter's waste was still
+profusely spread, Cope rose to the greening hills, to the fresh sweep
+of the wind, and to the sun-shot green and purple streakings over the
+water. The wind, in particular, took its own way: dry light sand, blown
+from higher shelvings, striped the dark wet edges of the shore; and
+every bending blade of sandgrass drew a circle about itself with its
+own revolving tip.
+
+Cope let the robust and willing Peter pick up most of the firewood and
+himself luxuriated in the spacious world round about him. Yes, a winter
+had flown--or, at any rate, had passed--and here he was again. There
+had been annoyances, but now he felt a wide and liberal relief. Here,
+for example, was the special stretch of shore on which Amy Leffingwell
+had praised his singing and had hinted her desire to accompany
+him,--but never mind that. Farther on was the particular tract where
+Hortense Dunton had pottered with her water-colors and had harried him
+with the heroines of eighteenth century fiction,--but never mind that,
+either. All those things were past, and he was free. Nobody remained
+save Carolyn Thorpe, an unaggressive girl with whom one could really
+trust oneself and with whom one could walk, if required, in comfort and
+content. Cope threw up his head to the hills and threw out his chest to
+the winds, and laid quick hands on a short length of weather-beaten
+hemlock plank. "Afraid I'm not holding up my end," he said to Peter.
+
+At the house again, he found that Carolyn had brought the oil-stove
+back into service, and, with Helga, had cast the cloth over the table
+and had set some necessary dishes on it. He fetched a pail or two of
+water from the pump, and each time placed a fresh young half-grown
+sassafras leaf on the surface. "The trade-mark of our bottling-works,"
+he said facetiously; "to show that our products are pure." And Carolyn,
+despite his facetiousness, felt more than ever that he might easily
+become a poet. Medora viewed the floating leaves with indulgent
+appreciation. "But don't let's cumber ourselves with many cares," she
+suggested; "we are here to make the best of the afternoon. Let's out
+and away,--the sooner the better."
+
+The three soon set forth for a stroll through spring's reviving domain.
+Cope walked between Medora and Carolyn, or ahead of them, impartially
+sweeping away twigs and flowering branches from before their faces. The
+young junipers were putting forth tender new tips; the bright leaves of
+the sassafras shone forth against the pines. Above the newly-rounded
+tops of the oaks and maples in the valley below them the Three Witches
+rose gauntly; and off on their far hill the two companion pines--(how
+had he named them? Romeo and Juliet? Pelleas and Melisande?)--still lay
+their dark heads together in mysterious confidences under the
+heightening glow of the late afternoon sun. Carolyn looked from them
+back to Cope and gave him a shy smile.
+
+He did not quite smile back. Carolyn was well enough, however. She was
+suitably dressed for a walk. Her shoes were sensible, and so was her
+hair. Amy had run to fluffiness. Hortense had often favored heavy waves
+and emphatic bandeaux. But Carolyn's hair was drawn back plainly from
+her forehead, and was gathered in a small, low-set knot. "Still, it's
+no concern of mine," he reminded himself, and walked on ahead.
+
+Carolyn's sensible shoes brought her back, with the others, at
+twilight. The three took up rather ornamentally (with aid from Peter
+and Helga) the lighter details of housekeeping. Toward the end of the
+stroll, Cope and Carolyn,--perhaps upon the mere unconscious basis of
+youth,--had rather fallen in together, and Medora Phillips, once or
+twice, had had to safeguard for herself her face and eyesight from the
+young trees that bordered their path. But that evening, as they sat on
+a settle before the driftwood fire, Medora took pains to place herself
+in the middle. Carolyn was a sweet young flower, doubtless--humbler,
+possibly, than Amy or Hortense; yet she too perhaps must be extirpated,
+gently but firmly, from the garden of desire.
+
+"You look better already," Medora said to Cope. "You'll go back
+to-morrow a new man."
+
+Her elbow was on the back of the settle and close to his shoulder. His
+face caught the glow from the fire.
+
+"Oh, I'm all right, I assure you," he said.
+
+"You _do_ look better," observed Carolyn on her own account. "This air
+is everything. Only a few hours of it----"
+
+"Another bit of wood on the fire, if you please, Carolyn," said her
+patroness.
+
+"Let me do it," said Cope. He rose quickly and laid on a stick or two.
+He remained standing on the edge of the glow. He hoped nobody would say
+again that he was looking rather thin and pale.
+
+"And what is Mr. Lemoyne doing this evening?" presently asked Mrs.
+Phillips in a dreamy undertone. Her manner was casual and negligent;
+her voice was low and leisurely. She seemed to place Lemoyne at a
+distance of many, many leagues. "Rehearsing, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes," replied Cope. "This new play has absorbed him completely."
+
+"He will do well?"
+
+"He always does. He always has."
+
+"Men in girls' parts are so amusing," said Carolyn. "Their walk is so
+heavy and clumsy, even if their dancing isn't. And when they speak up
+in those big deep bass and baritone voices...!"
+
+"Arthur will speak in a light tenor."
+
+"Will his walk be heavy and clumsy?" asked Mrs. Phillips.
+
+"He is an artist," replied Cope.
+
+"Not too much of one, I trust," she returned. "I confess I like boys
+best in such parts when they frankly and honestly seem to be boys.
+That's half the fun--and nine-tenths of the taste."
+
+"Taste?"
+
+"Yes, taste. Short for good taste. There's a great deal of room for
+bad. A thing may be done too thoroughly. Once or twice I've seen it
+done that way, by--artists."
+
+Cope, in the half-light, seemed rather unhappy.
+
+"He finds time for--for all this--this technique?" Mrs. Phillips asked.
+
+"He's very clever," replied Cope, rather unhappy still. "It does take
+time, of course. I'm concerned," he added.
+
+"About his other work?"
+
+"Yes." He stepped aside a little into the shadow.
+
+"Come back to your place," said Medora Phillips. "You look quite
+spectral."
+
+Cope, with a light sigh, returned to his post on the settle and to his
+share in the firelight. Silence fell. From far below were heard the
+active waves, moaning themselves to rest. And a featureless evening
+moved on slowly.
+
+
+
+
+30
+
+_COPE AS A HERO_
+
+
+At ten o'clock Cope found himself tucked away in a small room on the
+ground floor. It had been left quite as planned and constructed by the
+original builder of the house. It was cramped and narrow, with low
+ceiling and one small window. It gave on a short side-porch which was
+almost too narrow to sit on and which was apropos of no special
+prospect. Doubtless more than one stalwart youth had slept there before
+him,--a succession of farmers' sons who fed all day on the airs and
+spaces of the great out-of-doors, and who needed little of either
+through a short night's rest. It was more comfortable at the end of
+April than other guests had found it in mid-August.
+
+A little before eleven he awoke the house with a loud, ringing cry.
+Some one outside had passed his narrow window; feet were heard on the
+back porch and hands at the kitchen door. Peter was out as quickly as
+Cope himself; and the women, in differing stages of dress and
+half-dress, followed at once.
+
+While Mrs. Phillips and Carolyn were clinging to Cope, who had rushed
+out in undershirt and trousers, Peter had a short tussle on the porch
+with the intruder. He came in showing a scratch or two on his face, and
+he reported the pantry window broken open.
+
+"Some tramp along the beach saw our lights," suggested Carolyn.
+
+"What was he like, Peter?" asked Mrs. Phillips.
+
+"I couldn't make out in the dark," Peter replied. "But he fought hard
+for what he took, and he got away with it." He felt the marks on his
+face. "Must have been a pretty hungry man."
+
+"It was some refugee hiding in my woods," said Medora Phillips. She
+made her real thought no plainer. She never liked to see, in her walks,
+that distant prison, and she never spoke of it to her guests; but the
+fancy of some escaped convict lurking below among her thickets was
+often present in her mind.
+
+Her fancy was now busy with some burglar, or even some murderer, who
+had made his bolt for liberty; and she clung informally to the
+clarion-voiced Cope as to a savior. She saw, with displeasure, that
+Carolyn was disposed to cling too. She asked Carolyn to control herself
+and told her the danger was over; she even requested her to return to
+her room. But Carolyn lingered.
+
+Medora herself stood with Cope in the light of the dying fire. She was
+dressed almost as inadequately as he, but she felt that she must cling
+tremblingly to him and thank him for something or other.
+
+"I don't know what you've saved us from," she panted. "We may owe our
+very lives to you!"
+
+Peter, in the background, again thoughtfully felt his face and became
+conscious of a growing ache in the muscles of his arms. He retired,
+with a smile, to a still more distant plane. The regular did the work
+and the volunteer got the praise.
+
+Mrs. Phillips presently gave up her drooping hold on the reluctant Cope
+and called Peter forward. "Is anything missing?" she asked.
+
+"Only part of the breakfast, I expect," said Peter, with a grin. "And
+maybe some of the lunch. He surely was a hungry man!"
+
+"Well, we sha'n't starve. See to all the doors and windows before you
+go back to bed."
+
+But going back to bed was the one thing that she herself felt unable to
+do. She asked Carolyn to bring her a wrap of some kind or other, and
+sat down on the settle to talk it over. Cope had modestly slipped on a
+coat. The fire was dying--that was the only difference between twelve
+o'clock and ten.
+
+"If I had known what was going to happen," declared Medora volubly, "I
+never could have gone to bed at all! And to think"--here she left
+Carolyn's end of the settle and drew nearer to Cope's--"that I should
+ever have even thought of coming out here without a man!"
+
+She now rated her midnight intruder as a murderer, and believed more
+devoutly than ever that Cope had saved all their lives. Cope, who knew
+that he had contributed nothing but a loud pair of lungs, began to feel
+rather foolish.
+
+Nor did the anomalous situation commend itself in any degree to his
+taste. But it hit Medora Phillips' taste precisely, and she continued
+to sit there, pressing an emotional enjoyment from it. An hour passed
+before her excitement--an excitement kept up, perhaps, rather
+factitiously--was calmed, and she trusted herself back in her own room.
+
+Breakfast was a scanty affair,--it must be that if anything was to be
+left over for lunch. While they were busy with toast and coffee voices
+were heard in the woods--loud cries in call and answer.
+
+"There!" said Medora, setting down her cup; "I knew it!"
+
+Presently two men came climbing up to the house, while the voices of
+others were still audible in the humpy thickets below.
+
+The men were part of a search-party, of course,--a posse; and they
+wanted to know whether....
+
+"He tried to break in," said Medora Phillips eagerly; "but this
+gentleman...."
+
+She turned appreciatively to Cope. Carolyn, really impressed by her
+well-sustained seriousness and ardor, almost began to believe that they
+owed their lives to Bertram Cope alone.
+
+"Was he a--murderer?" asked Medora.
+
+The men looked serious, but made no categorical reply. They glanced at
+the wrecked pantry window, and they looked with more intentness at the
+long sliding footprints which led away, down the half-bare sand-slope.
+Then they slid down themselves.
+
+Medora asked Carolyn to do what she could toward constructing a lunch
+and then walked down to the shore with Cope to compose her nerves. No
+stroll today along the ridged amphitheatre of the hills, whence the
+long, low range of buildings, under that tall chimney, was so plainly
+in view. Still less relishing the idea of a tramp through the woods
+themselves, the certain haunt--somewhere--of some skulking desperado.
+No, they would take the shore itself--open to the wide firmament, clear
+of all snares, and free from every disconcerting sight.
+
+"Poor Carolyn!" said Medora presently. "How fluttered and inefficient
+she was! A good secretary--in a routine way--but so lacking in
+initiative and self-possession!"
+
+Cope's look tended to become a stare. He thought that Carolyn had been
+in pretty fair control of herself,--had been less fluttery and excited,
+indeed, than her employer.
+
+But Medora had been piqued, the night before, by Carolyn's tendency to
+linger on the scene and to help skim the emotional cream from the
+situation.
+
+"And in such dishabille, too! I hope you don't think she seemed
+immodest?"
+
+But Cope had given small heed to their dress, or to their lack of it.
+In fact, he had noticed little if any difference between them. He only
+knew that he had felt a degree more comfortable after getting his own
+coat on.
+
+"Carolyn understands her place pretty well," mused Medora. "Yet..."
+
+"Anybody might be excused for looking anyhow, at such a time," observed
+Cope, fending off the intrusion of a new set of considerations; "and in
+such a sudden stir. I hope nobody noticed how I looked!"
+
+"Well, you were noticeable," declared Medora, with some archness. She
+had been conscious enough of his spare waist, his sinewy arms, his
+swelling chest. "It was easy enough to see where the noise came from,"
+she said, looking him over.
+
+"Yes, I supplied the noise--and that only. It was Peter, please
+remember, who supplied the muscle."
+
+She declined to let her mind dwell on Peter. Peter possessed no charm.
+Besides, he was prosaically on the payroll.
+
+They continued to saunter along the sand. Yesterday's sparse clouds had
+vanished, along with much of yesterday's wind. The waters that had
+tumbled and vociferated now merely murmured. The lake stood calmly
+blue, and the new green was thickening on the hills. Confident birds
+flitted busily among the trees and shrubs. Spring was disclosed in its
+most alluring mood.
+
+Suddenly three or four figures appeared on the beach, a quarter of a
+mile away. They had descended through one of the sandy and ravaged
+channelings which broke at intervals the regulated rim of the hills,
+and they came on toward our two strollers. Medora closed her eyes to
+peer at them. "Are they marching a prisoner?" she asked.
+
+"They all appear to be walking free."
+
+"Are they carrying knapsacks?"
+
+"Khaki, puttees,--and knapsacks, I think."
+
+"Some university men said they might happen along to-day. If they
+really have knapsacks, and anything to eat in them, they're welcome.
+Otherwise, we had better hide quick--and hope they'll lose the place
+and pass us by."
+
+One of the advancing figures lifted a semaphoric arm. "Too late," said
+Cope; "They recognize you."
+
+"Then we'll walk on and meet them," declared Medora.
+
+The new-comers were young professors and graduate students. They were
+soon in possession of the thrilling facts of the past night, and one of
+them offered to be a prisoner, if a prisoner was desired. When they
+heard how Bertram Cope had saved the lives of defenseless women in a
+lonely land, they inclined to smile. Two of them had been present on
+another shore when Cope had "saved" Amy Leffingwell from a watery
+death, and they knew how far heroics might be pushed by women who were
+willing to idealize. Cope saw their smiles and felt that he had fumbled
+an opportunity: when he might have been a truncheon, he had been only a
+megaphone.
+
+The new arrivals, after climbing the sandy rise to the house, were
+shown the devastated kitchen and were asked to declare what provisions
+they carried. They had enough food for their own needs and a trifle to
+spare. Lunch might be managed, but any thought of a later meal was out
+of the question. "We'll start back at four-thirty," said Medora to
+Peter. "Meanwhile"--to the college men--"the world is ours."
+
+After lunch the enlarged party walked forth again. Mrs. Phillips had
+old things to show to fresh eyes: she formed the new visitors into a
+compact little group and let them see how good a guide she could be.
+Cope and Carolyn strolled negligently--even unsystematically--behind.
+Once or twice the personally conducted looked back.
+
+"I hope she won't tell them again how I came to the rescue," said Cope.
+"It makes a man feel too flat for words. Anybody might think, to hear
+her go on, that I had saved you all from robbery and murder...."
+
+"Why, but didn't you?" inquired Carolyn seriously.
+
+
+
+
+31
+
+_COPE GETS NEW LIGHT ON HIS CHUM_
+
+
+Cope had the luck to get back to Churchton with little further in the
+way of homage. He was careful with Carolyn; she had perhaps addressed
+him in a sonnet, and she might go on and address him in an ode. He
+thought he had done nothing to deserve the one, and he would do almost
+anything to escape the other. She was a nice pleasant quiet girl; but
+nice pleasant quiet girls were beginning to do such equivocal things in
+poetical print!
+
+Having returned to town by a method that put the minimum tax on his
+powers, Cope was in shape, next day, for an hour on the faculty
+tennis-courts. He played with no special skill or vigor, but he made a
+pleasing picture in his flannels; and Carolyn, who happened to
+pass--who passed by at about five in the afternoon, lingered for the
+spectacle and thought of two or three lines to start a poem with.
+
+Cope, unconscious of this, presently turned his attention to Lemoyne,
+who was on the eve of his first dress rehearsal and who was a good deal
+occupied with wigs and lingerie. Here one detail leads to another, and
+anyone who goes in wholeheartedly may go in dreadfully deep. Their room
+came to be strown with all the disconcerting items of a theatrical
+wardrobe. Cope soon reached the point where he was not quite sure that
+he liked it all, and he began to develop a distaste for Lemoyne's
+preoccupation with it. He came home one afternoon to find on the corner
+of his desk a long pair of silk stockings and a too dainty pair of
+ladies' shoes. "Oh, Art!" he protested. And then,--not speaking his
+essential thought,--"Aren't these pretty expensive?"
+
+"The thing has got to be done right," returned Lemoyne. "Feet are about
+the first thing they notice."
+
+At the actual performance Lemoyne's feet were noticed, certainly;
+though perhaps not more than his head. His wig, as is usually the case
+with dark people, was of a sunny blond hue. Its curls, as palpably
+artificial as they were voluminous, made his eyes look darker and
+somehow more liquid than ever. The contrast was piquant, almost
+sensational. Of course he had sacrificed, for the time, his small
+moustache. Lemoyne was not "Annabella" herself, but only her chief
+chum; yet shorter skirts and shorter sleeves and a deliberately assumed
+feminine air helped distinguish him from the hearty young lads who
+manoeuvred in the chorus.
+
+Just who are those who enjoy the epicene on the stage? Not many women,
+one prefers to think; and surely it arouses the impatience, if not
+worse, of many men. Most amateur drama is based, perhaps, on the
+attempted "escape": one likes to bolt from his own day, his own usual
+costume, his own range of ideas, and even from his own sex. Endeavors
+toward this last are most enjoyable--or least offensive--when they show
+frank and patent inadequacy. It was Arthur Lemoyne's fortune--or
+misfortune--to do his work all too well.
+
+Mrs. Phillips found his performance as little to her taste as she had
+anticipated. Carolyn Thorpe got as much enjoyment out of the gauche
+carriage and rough voices of the "chorus girls" as she had expected,
+but was not observed to warm toward "Annabella's" closest friend. The
+Pearsons, back from their wedding trip, had seats near the big crimson
+velvet curtain. Pearson himself openly luxuriated in the amusing
+ineptitude of two or three beskirted acquaintances among the upper
+classmen, but frowned at Lemoyne's light tenor tones and mincing ways.
+Of course the right sort of fellow, even if he had to sing his solo in
+the lightest of light tenors, would still, on lapsing into dialogue,
+reinstate himself apologetically by using as rough and gruff a voice as
+he could summon. Not so Lemoyne: he was doing a consistent piece of
+"characterization," and he was feminine, even overfeminine, throughout.
+
+"I never liked him, anyway," said George to Amy.
+
+Amy gave a nod of agreement. Yet why this critical zeal? There was but
+one man to like, after all.
+
+"That make-up! That low-cut gown!" said George, in further
+condemnation. "There's such a thing as going too far."
+
+Basil Randolph met Cope in the back lobby at the close of the
+performance. The dramatic season in the city itself had begun to
+languish; besides that, Randolph, in order to maintain his place on the
+edge of the life academical, always made it a point to remember the
+Grayfriars each spring.
+
+"A very thorough, consistent piece of work--your friend's," said
+Randolph. He spoke in a firm, net, withholding tone, looking Cope full
+in the face, meanwhile. What he said was little, perhaps, of what was
+in his mind; yet Cope caught a note of criticism and of condemnation.
+
+"Yes," he almost felt constrained to say in reply, "yes, I know what
+you did for him--for me, rather; and possibly this is not the outcome
+foreseen. I hope you won't regret your aid."
+
+Randolph went past him placidly. He seemed to have little to regret. On
+the contrary, he almost appeared to be pleased. He may have felt that
+Lemoyne had shown himself in a tolerably clear light, and that it was
+for Cope, should he choose, to take heed.
+
+Two days later, Randolph gave his impression of the performance to
+Foster. "It's just what I should have expected," declared the cripple
+acrimoniously. "I'm glad you never had any taste for the fellow; and I
+should have been quite as well pleased if I hadn't found you caring for
+the other."
+
+Randolph took refuge in a bland inexpressiveness. There was no need to
+school his face: he had only to discipline his voice.
+
+"Oh, well," he said smoothly, "it's only a passing _amitié_--something
+soon to be over, perhaps." He used an alien word because he could not
+select, on the instant, from his stock of English, the word he needed,
+and because he was not quite sure what idea he wanted to express. "I
+only wish," he went on, in the same even tone, "that this chap had been
+doing better by his work. At one early stage of the rehearsals there
+was a lot of registration and fee-paying for the new term. Well, if he
+hasn't been satisfactory, they needn't blame me. Let them blame the
+system that diverts so much time and attention to interests quite
+outside the regular curriculum."
+
+"You talk like a book!" said Foster, with blunt disdain.
+
+"Language----" began Randolph.
+
+"----was made to conceal thought," completed the other. "Stop talking.
+Stop thinking. Or, if you must think, just get your thoughts back on
+your business."
+
+Foster might have expressed himself still more pungently if he had been
+aware, as Cope was, of an episode which took place, behind the scenes,
+at the close of the performance. Lemoyne's singing and dancing in the
+last act had had a marked success: after all, people had come to enjoy
+and to applaud. Following two or three recalls, a large sheaf of roses
+had been passed over the footlights; for a close imitation of
+professional procedure was held to give the advantage of strict
+vraisemblance. This "tribute" Lemoyne took in character, with certain
+graces, pirouettes and smiles. His success so mounted to his head (for
+he was the one person in the case who approximated a professional
+effect) that after he had retired he could not quiet down and leave his
+part. He continued to act off-stage; and in his general state of
+ebulliency he endeavored to bestow a measure of upwelling femininity
+upon another performer who was in the dress of his own sex. This
+downright fellow, in cutaway and silk hat, did not understand,--or at
+least had no patience with a rôle carried too far. He brusquely cleared
+himself of Lemoyne's arm with a good vigorous push. This effort not
+only propelled Lemoyne against some scenery and left him, despite the
+voluminous blond wig, with a bruise on his forehead; it immediately
+pushed him out of his part, and it ended by pushing him out of the
+organization and even out of the University.
+
+"Keep off, will you!" said the young _élégant_ crudely.
+
+Lemoyne's "atmosphere" dissipated suddenly. His art-structure
+collapsed. As he looked about he saw plainly that the other man's act
+was approved. He had carried things too far. Well, such are the risks
+run by the sincere, self-revealing artist.
+
+When all this reached Cope, he felt a personal chagrin. Truly, the art
+of human intercourse was an art that called for some care. Lemoyne's
+slight wound left no trace after forty-eight hours--perhaps his
+"notices" in "The Index" and "The Campus" had acted as a salve; but
+certain sections of opinion remained unfriendly, and there was arising
+a new atmosphere of distaste and disapproval.
+
+The college authorities had not been satisfied, for some time, with his
+clerical labors, and some of them thought that his stage
+performance--an "exhibition" one of them termed it--called for reproof,
+or more. They laid their heads together and Lemoyne and Cope were not
+long in learning their decision. Lemoyne was pronounced a useless
+element in one field, a discrepant element in another, a detriment in
+both. His essentially slight connection with the real life of the
+University came to be more fully recognized. Alma Mater, in fine, could
+do without him, and meant to. Censure was the lot of the indignant boys
+who officered the society, and who asked Lemoyne to withdraw; and
+complete scission from the nourishing vine of Knowledge was his final
+fate.
+
+No occupation; no source of income. Winnebago was cold; nor was it to
+be warmed into ardor by press-notices. It had seen too many already and
+was tired of them.
+
+The two young men conferred. Again Basil Randolph was their hope.
+
+"He ought to be able to do something for me in the city," said Lemoyne.
+"He's acquainted in business circles, isn't he?"
+
+Cope bent over him--paler, thinner, more solicitous. "I'll try it," he
+said.
+
+Cope once more approached Randolph, but Randolph shook his head. He had
+no faith in Lemoyne, and he had done enough already against his own
+interests and desires.
+
+Lemoyne fluttered about to little effect for a few weeks, while Cope
+was finishing up his thesis. Beyond an accustomed and desired
+companionship, Lemoyne contributed nothing--was a drag, in truth. He
+returned to Winnebago a fortnight before the convocation and the
+conferring of degrees; and it was the understanding that, somehow, he
+and Cope should share together a summer divided between Winnebago and
+Freeford. Randolph was left to claim Cope's interest, if he could.
+
+
+
+
+32
+
+_COPE TAKES HIS DEGREE_
+
+
+Lemoyne's departure but a fortnight before Cope's small share in the
+convocation seemed to hint at mutual dissatisfaction; it might even
+stand for a disagreement, or possibly a quarrel. "It's just as well
+that he went," said Randolph to himself. "His presence here was no
+advantage to Bertram--nor to anybody else." And with another fortnight
+Cope himself would be gone; and who knew in what distant quarter he
+might take up his autumn work? His ambitions, as Randolph knew, pointed
+to some important university in the East. Meanwhile, make the most of
+the flying days.
+
+Medora Phillips took the same view. She let Carolyn Thorpe loose for a
+week's spring vacation, and sent Cope word that she was alone in a
+darkened, depopulated home. Amy married. Hortense banished. Carolyn
+waved aside. With all such varying devotions removed, why should he not
+look in on her loneliness, during these final days, for dinner or tea?
+He was still "charming"--however difficult, however recalcitrant. And
+he was soon to depart. And who could believe that the fall term would
+bring his equal or his like?
+
+Randolph, still taking his business easily, had suggestions for walks
+and lunches; he had also free time to make his suggestions operative.
+But Cope, though frequently seen in active movement on the campus and
+through the town, gave little heed to either of his elderly friends. He
+met them both, in High Street, on different occasions, and thanked and
+smiled and promised--and kept away. He was doubtless absorbed in his
+special work, in the details of the closing year. He may have thought
+(as young men have been known to think) that, in accepting their
+invitations, he had done enough for them already. He had shown his good
+will on several occasions; let that suffice. Or he may have thought (as
+young men have been found capable of thinking) not at all: other
+concerns, more pressing and more contemporaneous, may have crowded them
+out of his mind altogether.
+
+"I wonder if it's sensitiveness?" asked Randolph of Foster. "His chum
+didn't go away in the best of good odor...."
+
+"Settle it for yourself," returned Foster brusquely. "And recall that
+you have an office--and might have office-hours. Still, if you insist
+on asking me----"
+
+"I don't. But you may speak, if you like."
+
+"And if you will consent to be fobbed off with a short-measure
+answer----"
+
+"That's right. Don't say all you think."
+
+"Then I would put it somewhere between indifference and ingratitude.
+Nearer the latter. We know the young."
+
+"I don't feel that I've done so very much for him," said Randolph,
+rather colorlessly.
+
+"You were inclined to."
+
+"H'm, yes. I could have opened up avenues that would have made his year
+here a very different thing. Perhaps he didn't realize what I could do.
+And perhaps he found me too old."
+
+"Shall you attend the convocation?"
+
+"I go usually. I'll push him off from shore and waft him good-bye."
+
+"Good-bye? Good riddance!"
+
+"You never liked him."
+
+"I never did. If he leaves town without showing up here, no loss."
+
+"Medora expects him here?"
+
+"I think so."
+
+Randolph descended to the lower floor. Mrs. Phillips was alone, seated
+behind a tea-service that steamed with expectation.
+
+"Going?" she asked.
+
+"Going. Joe is grouchy and violent today. And he keeps on reminding me
+that I have an office."
+
+Medora glanced at the clock. Expectation seemed to be simmering down.
+
+"Stay a few moments if you like. Forget the office a little longer.
+I'll make some fresh."
+
+"Not all these preparations for me?"
+
+"Well, they're here. Take advantage."
+
+"You're all alone?"
+
+"Alone. The house is empty."
+
+Medora tried to look as if at the heart of a tremendous vacuum.
+
+"I can't fill it."
+
+"You can fill fifteen minutes."
+
+"Oh, if you're going to confound time and space...!"
+
+He sat down receptively.
+
+Medora rang a bell and harried Helga a little.
+
+She glanced at Randolph. He sat there as if less to fill than to be
+filled.
+
+"Say something," she said.
+
+"Are you going to the convocation?"
+
+"No."
+
+He sat silent.
+
+"Does that exhaust the subjects of interest?" she asked.
+
+"Pretty nearly. Doesn't it?"
+
+Medora fell silent in turn,--let the light clatter of the tea things
+speak for her.
+
+"Are you going to the convocation?" he presently asked again.
+
+"Such variety!" she mocked.
+
+"Are you?"
+
+She hesitated.
+
+"Yes," she said.
+
+"That's better. Let's go together--as friends."
+
+"Who would imagine us going as enemies?"
+
+"Who, indeed?" Yet if they went together they went as reconciled
+competitors,--they went as the result of a truce.
+
+"I should like to see Bertram Cope in cap and gown," he said.
+
+"He has worn them before, he tells me."
+
+"As a----?"
+
+"As a member of the choir, during his undergraduate days."
+
+"I see."
+
+"I never noticed him especially, then," she acknowledged.
+
+"We can notice him now."
+
+Medora made a slight grimace. "Yes, we can notice." He the actor; they
+the audience. "A farewell performance."
+
+"A final view."
+
+Convocation day came clear, fair, mild. The professors walked in
+colorful solemnity beneath the elms and up the middle aisle of the
+chapel, lending both to outdoors and indoors the enlivenment of hoods
+red, yellow, purple. The marshals led strings of candidates--long
+strings and short--to the platform where the president sat, and the
+deans presented in due order their bachelors, masters and doctors. The
+rapid handing out of the diplomas brought frequent applause--bits,
+spatters, volleys, as the case might be. There was recognition for a
+Chinaman, for a negro law-student, for a pair of Filipinos; there was a
+marked outburst for a husky young man who was assumed by the uninformed
+to have been a star in the university's athletic life; there was a
+respectful but emphatic acknowledgment for a determined-looking
+middle-aged woman with gray hair, who was led on with four men as a
+little string of five; there was a salvo for a thoughtful, dignified
+man of thirty-odd, who went up as a group in himself, attended by
+marshals before and behind; and there was a slight spatter of applause
+for Bertram Cope (one of a small procession of six), yet rather more
+for a smiling young man who followed him....
+
+Cope looked somewhat spare, despite his voluminous gown. The trying
+lights added little color to his face, and brought his cheek-bones into
+undue prominence. But he took his sheepskin with a bow and a gesture
+that extinguished several of his companions; and he faced the audience,
+on descending from the stage, with a composed effect gained by
+experience in the choir. The lustre in the ceiling lit up his yellow
+hair and his blue eyes: "He is as charming as ever!" thought Medora
+Phillips.
+
+"He's had a hard pull of it," commented Randolph.
+
+"I hope his own people will feed him up this summer," said Medora. Her
+emphasis was wayward; "He wouldn't let we do it," she seemed to mean.
+
+"Nor me," she almost made Randolph say.
+
+There was a recessional, and then the crowds of students flooded the
+corridors and circulated under the fresh foliage of the campus.
+Randolph and Medora Phillips passed out with the rest of the
+assemblage. In the midst of one of the avenues of elms they noticed
+Cope as the center of a little group: two plain, elderly people (his
+parents, doubtless) and--and----
+
+Medora Phillips looked twice. Yes, the other figure was Carolyn Thorpe,
+offering congratulations. Carolyn had returned to her post and her work
+the day before. "H'm," thought Medora, disposed to be miffed. Still,
+Carolyn had, after all, the same right to attend as anyone else.
+
+Medora and Basil Randolph added their congratulations to Carolyn's.
+Cope, still in academic garb, performed the necessary introductions.
+His air was eager, but cursory; smiling and ready, yet impersonal and
+cool; above all, expeditious. If his parents passed on with the
+impression that Medora Phillips and Basil Randolph were but casual
+acquaintances, worthy of nothing beyond brief formalities, the blame
+was his own.
+
+"I'm showing father and mother over the campus," he said, with an open
+smile and a wave with his diploma, as he edged away.
+
+The elders docilely took their cue, and moved away with him.
+
+"Well," said Randolph, "there _are_ buildings, of course; and
+fountains, and sun-dials, and memorial benches; but..."
+
+"They add nothing to him," pronounced Medora, as she looked back on the
+retiring party.
+
+"Did you expect them to?" he asked. "Charm, like guilt, is personal.
+Anyhow, there seems to be no brother," he added.
+
+"Well, come, Carolyn," said Medora, to her returned secretary, who was
+looking after the party too; "let's start for home. Good afternoon,
+Basil."
+
+
+"What nice, good, pleasant, friendly people they are!" breathed Carolyn.
+
+Randolph had strolled away, and Medora Phillips turned a studious
+glance on her companion. Carolyn was conceivably in a state of
+mind--keyed up to an all-inclusive appreciation. Did that foreshadow
+further verse?--a rustic rhapsody, a provincial pantoum? But Medora
+withheld question. Much as she would have enjoyed a well-consolidated
+impression of the visitors, she did not intend to secure it by
+interrogating Carolyn Thorpe.
+
+
+
+
+33
+
+_COPE IN A FINAL VIEW_
+
+
+Cope, after a few days, followed his parents back to Freeford. He may
+have said good-bye to his landlady and to some of his associates in his
+department; but he contrived no set adieux for the friends who had done
+so much for him--or had tried to--through the past year. Basil Randolph
+and Medora Phillips had their last view of him when, diploma in hand,
+he led his parents away, over the campus.
+
+"Oh, well," said Randolph resignedly, "we were less important to him
+than we thought. Only a couple of negligible items among many. Entered
+in his ledger--if we _were_ entered--and now faded away to a dim,
+rusty, illegible scrawl...."
+
+"Stop it, Basil! You make me feel old, antique, antediluvian. I don't
+want to. I shan't let myself be pushed back and ignored. I'm going to
+give Amy and George a rousing big dinner before long; and when the fall
+term opens I shall entertain as never before. And if that young man
+from the South turns up here during the summer to see Hortense, I shall
+do a lot for them."
+
+Hortense Dunton had long since returned, of course, from the Tennessee
+and North Carolina mountains; but she ignored the convocation. One drop
+of bitterness, if tasted again--even reminiscently--would have turned
+everything to gall. Instead, she found a measure of sweetness in the
+letters which followed on her return from that region. They were
+addressed in a bold, dashing young hand, and bore the postmark
+"Nashville." Hortense was inclined to let them lie conspicuously on the
+front-hall table, for half an hour or so, before she took them up.
+Little might be absolutely known about her passage with Cope; but there
+the letters lay, for her aunt's eye and for Carolyn Thorpe's.
+
+Carolyn prattled a little, not indiscreetly, about her meeting with the
+Freeford family on the campus. As Basil Randolph himself had done
+months before, she endeavored to construct a general environment for
+them and to determine their place in the general social fabric. She
+had, however, the advantage of having seen them; she was not called to
+make an exiguous evocation from the void. She still held that they were
+nice, good, pleasant, friendly people: if they had subordinated
+themselves, docilely and automatically, to the prepotent social and
+academic figures of the society about them, that in no wise detracted
+from the favorable impression they had made on her.
+
+"Just the right parents for Bertram," she said fondly, to herself. She
+made, almost unconsciously, the allowance that is still generally made,
+among Americans, for the difference between two generations: the elder,
+of course, continues to provide a staid, sober, and somewhat primitive
+background for the brilliancy of the younger. Her own people, if they
+appeared in Churchton, might seem a bit simple and provincial too.
+
+Hortense took Carolyn's slight and fond observations with a silent
+scorn. When she spoke at all, she was likely to say something about
+"family"; and it was gathered that the dashing correspondent at
+Nashville was conspicuously "well-connected." Also, that he belonged to
+the stirring New South and had put money in his purse. Hortense's
+contempt for the semi-rustic and impecunious Cope became boundless.
+
+About the middle of July a letter lay on the front-hall table for
+Carolyn. It was from Cope.
+
+"Only think!" said Carolyn to herself, in a small private ecstasy
+within her locked bedchamber; "he wrote on his own account and of his
+own accord. Not a line from me; not a suggestion!"
+
+The letter was an affair of two small pages. "Yours very sincerely,
+Bertram L. Cope" simply told "My dear Miss Thorpe" that he had been
+spending three or four days in Winnebago, Wisconsin, and that he had
+now returned home for a month of further study, having obtained a post
+in an important university in the East, at a satisfactory stipend. A
+supplementary line conveyed regards to Mrs. Phillips. And that was all.
+
+Was it a handful of husks, or was it a banquet? Carolyn took it for the
+latter and lived on it for days. Little it mattered what or how much he
+had written: he had written, and of his own accord--as Carolyn made a
+point of from the first. There is an algebraic formula expressive of
+the truth that "1" is an infinitely greater number of times than "0."
+And a single small taper is infinitely greater in point of light and
+cheer than none at all. Carolyn's little world underwent illumination,
+and she with it. She promptly soared to a shining infinity.
+
+Medora Phillips could not overlook Carolyn's general glow, nor the
+sense of elevation she conveyed. Things became clearer still when
+Carolyn passed on the scanty message which Cope had added at the end.
+"Best regards to Mrs. Phillips"--there it was, so far as it went. And
+Medora felt, along with Carolyn, that a slight mention was an immensity
+of times greater than no mention at all. "Very kind, very thoughtful of
+him, I'm sure," she said without irony.
+
+Carolyn let her read the letter for herself. It was a brief, cool,
+succinct thing, and not at all unsuited for general circulation. "Best
+regards to Mrs. Phillips. Yours very sincerely, Bertram L. Cope," she
+read again; then, like Carolyn, she retired for meditation.
+
+Well, from its dozen or fifteen lines several things might fairly be
+inferred. "Three or four days in Winnebago"--a scanty pattern for a
+visit. Had three or four been enough? Had Lemoyne been found glum and
+unpleasant? Had those months of close companionship brought about a
+mutually diminished interest? Not a word as to Lemoyne's accompanying
+him to Freeford, or joining him there later. On the contrary, a strong
+implication that there would be sufficient to occupy him without the
+company of Lemoyne or anybody else: evidences of an eye set solely on
+the new opportunity in the East.
+
+"Well, if he is going to get along without him," said Medora to
+herself, "it will be all the better for him. He was never any advantage
+to him," she added, with an informal and irresponsible use of her
+pronouns. But she knew what she meant and had no auditor to satisfy.
+
+When, however, she touched on the matter with Basil Randolph she showed
+more exactitude. Randolph had lingered late upstairs with Foster, and
+he had been intercepted, on his way out, with an invitation to remain
+to dinner. "Very well," he said. "Sing-Lo is not invariably inspired on
+Monday evening. I shall be glad to stay."
+
+He felt, in fact, the need of a little soothing. Foster had been taking
+a farewell shot at Cope and had been rough and vindictive. He had heard
+something of the antics of "Annabella's" partner and had magnified
+characteristically the seriousness of the offense. "What hope for
+him"--meaning Cope--"so long as he goes on liking and admiring that
+fellow?"
+
+"Well," returned Randolph, in an effortless platitude, "liking is the
+great mystery--whether you take its coming or its going."
+
+"The sooner this one goes, the better," snapped Foster. "Have you heard
+from that fellow at all?" he inquired.
+
+"'That fellow'? What fellow--this time?"
+
+"The other one, of course. Cope."
+
+"No."
+
+Foster wiped out Cope with one question.
+
+"Likely to 'cultivate' some other young chap, next year?"
+
+Randolph had a moment of sober thoughtfulness.
+
+"No."
+
+"Good! Get back into harness; have 'hours' and all the rest of it. Best
+thing in the world for you. The young care so much for us--the devil
+they do!"
+
+Foster gave a savage, dragging clutch at his shade and twisted
+rebelliously in his chair.
+
+Randolph left him to himself and went below.
+
+Downstairs dinner proceeded cautiously. There was no chance for an
+interchange of thought until the two young women should have been got
+out of the way. Hortense had her own affair at the back of her head,
+and Carolyn hers. Neither could sympathize with the other. Hortense's
+manner to Carolyn was one of half-suppressed insolence. Carolyn, buoyed
+up interiorly, seemed able to endure it,--perhaps was not fully
+conscious of it. There was relief when, after dessert, each arose and
+went her respective way.
+
+Medora and Randolph settled down on a causeuse in the drawing-room. The
+place was half-lighted, but Randolph made out that his companion was
+taking on a conscious air of pseudo-melancholy.
+
+Her eyes roved the dim, cluttered room with studied mournfulness, and
+she said, presently:
+
+"Dear old house! Undergoing depopulation, and soon to be a waste."
+
+"Depopulation?"
+
+"Yes; they're leaving it one by one. First, Amy. You remember Amy?"
+
+"I believe so."
+
+"She married George and went away. You recall the occasion?"
+
+"I think I was present."
+
+"And now it's Hortense."
+
+"Is it, indeed?"
+
+She told him about the gallant young Southerner in Tennessee, and gave
+a forecast of a probable pairing.
+
+"And next it will be Carolyn."
+
+"Carolyn? Who has cast his eye on her?"
+
+Medora shot it out.
+
+"Bertram Cope!"
+
+"Cope!" Randolph gave himself another twist in that well-twisted sofa.
+
+"Cope," she repeated. If the boy were indeed beyond her own reach, she
+would report his imminent capture by another with as much effect as she
+could command.
+
+And she told of Carolyn's fateful letter.
+
+"So that's how it stands?" he said thoughtfully.
+
+"I don't say 'how' it stands. I don't say that it 'stands' at all. But
+he has prospects and she has hopes."
+
+"Prospects and hopes,--a strong working combination."
+
+Medora took the leap. "She will marry him, of course," she said
+decidedly. "After his having jilted Amy----"
+
+"'Jilted' her? Do you understand it that way?"
+
+"And trampled on Hortense----"
+
+"'Trampled'? Surely you exaggerate."
+
+"And ignored me----You will let me use that mild word, 'ignored'?"
+
+"Its use is granted. He has ignored others too."
+
+"After all that, who is there left in the house but Carolyn? Listen;
+I'll tell you how it will be. She has answered his letter, of
+course,--imagine whether or not she was prompt about it!--and he will
+answer hers----"
+
+"_Will_ answer it?"
+
+"Not at once, perhaps; but soon: in the course of two or three weeks.
+Then she will reply,--and there you have a correspondence in full
+swing. Then, in the fall he will write her from his new post in the
+East, and say: 'Dear Girl,--At last I can----,' and so on."
+
+"You mean that you destine poor Carolyn for a man who is so apt at
+jilting and trampling and ignoring?"
+
+"Who else is there?" Medora continued to demand sturdily. "In October
+they will be married----"
+
+"Heaven forbid!" ejaculated Randolph.
+
+"You have something better to suggest?"
+
+"Nothing better. Something different. Listen, as you yourself say. Next
+October I shall call on you, put my hand in my inside pocket, bring out
+a letter and read it to you. It will run like this: 'My dear Mr.
+Randolph,--You will be pleased, I am sure, to hear that I now have a
+good position at the university in this pleasant town. Arthur Lemoyne,
+whom you recall, is studying psychology here, and we are keeping house
+together. He wishes to be remembered. I thank you for your many
+kindnesses,'--that is put in as a mere possibility,--'and also send
+best regards to Mrs. Phillips and the members of her household.
+Sincerely yours, Bertram L. Cope.'"
+
+"I won't accept that!" cried Medora. "He will marry Carolyn, and I
+shall do as much for her as I did for Amy, and as much as I expect to
+do for Hortense."
+
+"I see. The three matches made and the desolation of the house
+complete."
+
+"Complete, yes; leaving me alone among the ruins."
+
+"And nothing would rescue you from them but a fourth?"
+
+"Basil, you are not proposing?"
+
+"I scarcely think so," he returned, with slow candor. "I shouldn't care
+to live in this house; and you----"
+
+"I knew you never liked my furnishings!"
+
+"----and you, I am sure, would never care to live in any other."
+
+"I shall stay where I am," she declared. "Shall you stay where you
+are?" she asked keenly.
+
+"Perhaps not."
+
+"Confess that housekeeping on your own account is less attractive than
+it once was."
+
+"I do. Confess that you, with all your outfit and all your goings-on,
+never quite--never quite--succeeded in..."
+
+Medora shrugged. "The young, at best, only tolerate us. We are but the
+platform they dance on,--the ladder they climb by."
+
+"After all, he was a 'charming' chap. Your own word, you know."
+
+"Yet scarcely worth the to-do we made over him," said Medora, willing
+to save her face.
+
+Randolph shrugged in turn, and threw out his hands in a gesture which
+she had never known him to employ before.
+
+"Worth the to-do? Who is?"
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 8101 ***