His prompt acceptance was most welcome to Randolph. Cope had dwelt, for a moment, on the actual presence of Aunt Harriet and on his need of her. Randolph had made no precise study of recent chronology, taking the reason given over the wire as a valid one and feeling glad that there was no hitch this time.
Randolph gave Cope a rapid view of the apartment before they sat down to dinner. There were fewer pictures on the newly-papered walls than there were to be, and fewer rugs on the freshly-varnished floors. “My standing lamp will be in that corner,” said Randolph, in the living-room, “—when it comes.” He drew attention to a second bedroom where a man could be put up on occasion: “you, for example, if you ever find yourself shut out late.” He saw Sir Galahad’s gauntlets on the dresser. He even gave Cope a glimpse of his kitchen, where a self-contained Oriental, slightly smiling but otherwise inexpressive, seemed to be dealing competently with the gas-range. But Cope was impressed, most of all, by the dining-room table and its paraphernalia. At Mrs. Phillips’ he had accepted the china, silver and napery as a matter of course—an elaborate entity quite outside his own thoughts and calculations: it was all so immensely far beyond his reach and his needs. Randolph, however, had dealt as a bachelor with a problem which he himself as a bachelor must soon take up, on however different a scale and plane. For everything here was rich and handsome; he should not know how to select such things—still less how to pay for them. He felt dashed; he felt depressed; once more the wonder of people’s “having things.” He sipped his soup in the spirit of humility, and did not quite recover with the chops.
Randolph made little talk; he was glad merely to have Cope there. He indulged no slightest reference to the accident; he assumed, willingly enough, that Cope had done well in a sudden emergency, but did not care to dwell on his judgment at the beginning. Still, a young man was properly enough experimental, venturesome …
Cope had recovered himself by the time dessert was reached. He accomplished an adjustment to his environment, and Randolph was glad to feel his unaffected response to good food properly cooked and served. “He shan’t gipsy all the time,” Randolph said to himself. “I shall try to have him here at least twice a week.” Once in a while the evening might be stormy, and then the gauntlets would be laid on the dresser—perhaps after an informal smoke in pajamas among the curios ranged round the small den.
Cope set down his demitasse with a slight sigh. “Well,” he said, “I suppose that, before long, I shall have to buy a few sticks of furniture myself and a trifle of ‘crockery.’ And a percolator.” Randolph looked across at him in surprise.
“You are moving, then—you too?” Not to greatly better quarters, he almost hoped.
“Yes; and we shall need a few small things by way of outfit.” “We.” Randolph looked more intently. Housekeeping à deux? A roommate? Matrimony? Here was the intrusion of another piece on the board—a piece new and unexpected. Would it turn out to be an added interest for himself, or a plain source of disconcertment? Cope, having unconsciously set the ball rolling, gave it further impetus. He sketched his absent friend and told of their plans for the winter and spring terms. “I shall try for a large easy chair,” he concluded, “unless Arthur can be induced to bring one with him.”
Randolph, by this time, had led Cope into the den, established him between padded arms, and given him a cigar. He drew Cope’s attention to the jades and swordguards, to the odd assortment of primitive musical instruments (which would doubtless, in time, find a place at the Art Museum in the city), and to his latest acquisition—a volume of Bembo’s Le Prose. It had reached him but a week before from Venice—“in Venetia, al segno del Pozzo, MDLVII,” said the title-page, in fact. It was bound in vellum, pierced by bookworms, and was decorated, in quaint seventeenth-century penmanship, with marginal annotations, and also, on the fly leaves, with repeated honorifics due to a study of the forms of address by some young aspirant for favor. Randolph had rather depended on it to take Cope’s interest; but now the little envoi from the Lagoons seemed lesser in its lustre. Cope indeed took the volume with docility and looked at its classical title-page and at its quaint Biblical colophon; but, “Just who was ‘Pietro Bembo’?” he asked; and Randolph realized, with a slight shock, that young instructors teach only what they themselves lately have learned, and that, in many cases, they have not learned much.
But in truth neither paid much heed to the tabulated vocables of the Venetian cardinal—nor to any of the other rarities near by. Basil Randolph was wondering how he was to take Arthur Lemoyne, and was asking himself if his trouble in setting up a new ménage was likely to go for nothing; and Bertram Cope, while he pursued the course of the bookworm through the parchment covers and the yellowed sheets within, was wondering in what definite way his host
