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.
XIV
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
