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 someone else’s; a sister confined to her schoolroom; 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 classroom. 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 goodbye.” 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 goodbye to him upstairs 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 upgrade, 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
