The meeting took place in Mrs. Phillips’ drawing-room; he would trust himself to no more strolls on the campus, to no more confabs in college halls. There was protection in numbers, and numbers seldom failed beneath Medora Phillips’ roof. They failed this time, however. Mrs. Phillips and Hortense were away at a reading; only Amy and Carolyn were at home. Cope seized on Carolyn as at a straw. He thanked her warmly again for her halting offices in the matter of that last song, and he begged that he might hear some of her recent verse. His appeal was vehement, almost boisterous: Carolyn, surprised, felt that he was ready at last to grant her a definite personality.
Amy tried in vain to remove Carolyn from the board. But Carolyn, like Hortense, had finally joined the ranks of the “recognized”; she was determined (being still ignorant, Cope was glad to see, regarding Amy’s claims) to make this recognition so marked as to last beyond the moment. She played a little—not well. She read. She even accompanied Amy to the door at the close of Cope’s short stay. He shook hands with them both. He had decided that he would do no more than this with Amy, in any event, and Carolyn’s presence made his predetermined course easy, even obligatory. Yet he went out into the night feeling, somehow, that he had acted solely on his resolution and that he might consider himself a man of some decisiveness, after all. Amy had looked disappointed, but had contrived to whisper that she would write from Iowa. That, of course, was to be looked for, and would represent the combined efforts of herself and her home circle; yet he had a fortnight for consideration and counsel.
Cope, during his first few days at home, was moody and abstracted: his parents found him adding little to the Christmas cheer. His mother, always busy over domestic cares and now busier than ever, thought that he must have been working too hard. She would stand in the kitchen door with a half-trimmed pie on one hand and ponder him as he sat in the dining-room, staring absorbedly at the Franklin stove. His father, who saw him chiefly in the evening, by the gaslight of the old-fashioned house, found his face slightly pinched: was his pocket pinched too, and would he be likely, before leaving, to ask help toward making up a deficit? His sister Rosalys, who lived a life of dry routine, figured him as deep in love. He let several days pass without hinting what the real situation was.
There was interest all round when, the day before Christmas, the postman came along the bleak and flimsy street and left a letter for him. Cope was away from the house, and Rosalys, studying the envelope’s penmanship and even its postmark, found vague confirmation of her theory: some college girl—one of his own students, probably—was home on vacation just as he was. If so, a “small town” person of caste and character like themselves; not brilliant, but safe. She set up the letter edgewise on the back parlor mantelpiece.
When Cope came in at noon and saw the letter, his face fell. He put it in his pocket, sat silent at table, and disappeared as soon as the meal was over. Rosalys, whose pupils were off her mind for a few days and who had thought to spare, began to shade her theory.
Cope read the letter in the low-ceiled back bedroom (the ceiling sloped away on one side) which had been his for so many years. Those years of happy boyhood—how far away they seemed now, and how completely past! Surely he had never thought to come back to these familiar walls to such effect as this. … Well, what did it say?
It said, in its four pages (yes, Amy had really limited herself thus), how joyous she was that the dear Christmas season had brought her such a beautiful love-gift; it said that mother was so pleased and happy—and even mentioned a sudden aunt; it said how willingly she would wait on until. …
That evening Cope made his announcement. They were all seated round the reading-lamp in the back parlor, where the old Brussels carpet looked dim and where only venerated age kept the ornate French clock from seeming tawdry. Cope looked down at the carpet and up at the clock, and spoke.
Yes, they must have it.
His mother took the shock first and absorbed most of it. She led a humdrum life and she was ready to welcome romance. To help adjust herself she laid her hands, with a soft, sweeping motion, on the two brown waves that drew smoothly across her temples, and then she transferred them to his, held his head, and gave him a kiss. Rosalys took his two hands warmly and smiled, and he tried to smile back. His father twisted the tip of his short gray beard, watched his son’s mien, and said little. Day after tomorrow, with the major part of their small Christmas festivities over, he would ask how this unexpected and unwarranted situation had come about, and how, in heaven’s name, the thing was to be carried through: by what means, with whose help? … In his complex of thought the word “thesis” came to his tongue, but he kept from speaking it. He had been advised that his son had at last struck out definitely into some bookish bypath—just what bypath mattered little, he gathered, if it were but followed to the end. Yet the end was still far—and the boy evidently realized this. He was glad that Bertram was sober over the prospect and over his present plan—which was a serious undertaking, just now, in truth.
Cope had to adjust himself to all this, and to endure, besides, the congratulations—or the comments—of a number
