“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.
VIII
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’
