“I certainly presented you.”
“To ‘Amy.’ ”
“Well, that was careless, if true. Her name is Amy Leffingwell; and Hortense’s name is—”
“Stop, please. Pay it out gradually. My poor head can hold only what it can. Names without people to attach them to. …”
“The people will be here presently,” Medora Phillips said, rather shortly. Surely this young man was taking his own tone. It was not quite the tone usually taken by college boys on their first call. Her position and her imposing surroundings—yes, her kindliness in noticing him at all—might surely save her from informalities that almost shaped into impertinences. Yet, on the other hand, nothing bored one more than a young man who openly showed himself intimidated. What was there behind this one? More than she had thought? Well, if so, none the worse. Time might tell.
“So Miss Leffingwell plays?” He flared out his blue-white smile. “Let me learn my lesson page by page.”
“Yes, she plays,” returned Medora Phillips briefly. “Guess what,” she continued presently, half placated.
They were again side by side on a sofa, each with an elbow on its back and the elbows near together. Nor was Medora Phillips, though plump, at all the graceless, dumpy little body she sometimes taxed herself with being.
“What? Oh, piano, I suppose.”
“Piano!”
“What’s wrong?”
“The piano is common: it’s assumed.”
“Oh, she performs on something unusual? Xylophone?”
“Be serious.”
“Trombone? I’ve seen wonders done on that in a ‘lady orchestra.’ ”
“Don’t be grotesque.” She drew her dark eyebrows into protest. “What a sight!—a delicate young girl playing a trombone!”
“Well, then—a harp. That’s sometimes a pleasant sight.”
“A harp needs an express wagon. Though of course it is pretty for the arms.”
“Arms? Let me see. The violin?”
“Of course. And that’s probably the very first thing you thought of. Why not have mentioned it?”
“I suppose I’ve been taught the duty of making conversation.”
“The duty? Not the pleasure?”
“That remains to be. …” He paused. “So she has arms,” he pretended to muse. “I confess I hadn’t quite noticed.”
“She passed you a cup of tea, didn’t she?”
“Oh, surely. And a sandwich. And another. And a slice of layer cake, with a fork. And another cup of tea. And a macaroon or two—”
“Am I a glutton?”
“Am I? Some of all that provender was for me, as I recall.”
They were still side by side on the sofa. Both were cross-kneed, and the tip of her russet boot almost grazed that of his Oxford tie. He did not notice: he was already arranging the first paragraph of a letter to a friend in Winnebago, Wisconsin.
“Dear Arthur:
I called—as I said I was going to. She is a scrapper. She goes at you hammer and tongs—pretending to quarrel as a means of entertaining you …”
Medora Phillips removed her elbow from the back of the sofa, and began to prod up her cushions. “How about your work?” she asked. “What are you doing?”
He came back. “Oh, I’m boning. Some things still to make up. I’m digging in the poetry of Gower—the ‘moral Gower.’ ”
“Well, I see no reason why poetry shouldn’t be moral. Has he been publishing anything lately that I ought to see?”
“Not—lately.”
“I presume I can look into some of his older things.”
“They are all old—five hundred years and more. He was a pal of Chaucer’s.”
She gave him an indignant glance. “So that’s it? You’re laying traps for me? You don’t like me! You don’t respect me!”
One of the recalcitrant cushions fell to the floor. They bumped heads in trying to pick it up.
“Traps!” he said. “Never in the world! Don’t think it! Why, Gower is just a necessary old bore. Nobody’s supposed to know much about him—except instructors and their hapless students.”
He added one more sentence to his letter to “Arthur”: “She pushes you pretty hard. A little of it goes a good way …”
“Oh, if that’s the case …” she said. “How about your thesis?” she went on swiftly. “What are you going to write about?”
“I was thinking of Shakespeare.”
“Shakespeare! There you go again! Ridiculing me to my very face!”
“Not at all. There’s lots to say about him—or them.”
“Oh, you believe in Bacon!”
“Not at all—once more. I should like to take a year and spend it among the manor-houses of Warwickshire. But I suppose nobody would stake me to that.”
“I don’t know what you have in mind; some wild goose chase, probably. I expect your friends would like it better if you spent your time right here.”
“Probably. I presume I shall end by doing a thesis on the ‘color-words’ in Keats and Shelley. A penniless devil was no luck.”
“Anybody has luck who can form the right circle. Stay where you are. A circle formed here would do you much more good than a temporary one four thousand miles away.”
Voices were heard in the front yard. “There they come, now,” Mrs. Phillips said. She rose, and one more of the wayward cushions went to the floor. It lay there unregarded—a sign that a promising tête-à-tête was, for the time being, over.
III
Cope Is “Entertained”
Mrs. Phillips stepped to the front door to meet the half dozen young people who were cheerily coming up the walk. Cope, looking at the fallen cushions with an unseeing eye, remained within the drawing-room door to compose a further paragraph for the behoof of his correspondent in Wisconsin:
“Several girls helped entertain me. They came on as thick as spatter. One played a few things on the violin. Another set up her easel and painted a picture for us. A third wrote a poem and read it to us. And a few sophomores hung about in the background. It was all rather too much. I found myself preferring those hours together in dear old Winnebago. …”
Only one of the sophomores—if the young men were really of that objectionable tribe—came indoors with the young ladies. The others—either engaged elsewhere or consciously unworthy—went away after a moment or two on the front steps. Perhaps they did not feel “encouraged.” And in fact Mrs. Phillips looked back toward Cope
