“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 dogtrot 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
