“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 downstairs—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 boardinghouses 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.
VI
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,
