Amy’s voice took on a new tone. Why, she seemed to be feeling, must Arthur Lemoyne be mentioned, and mentioned so early? Yet Bertram had put him—instinctively, unconsciously—at the head of the little verbal procession just begun.
Cope’s response was dry and meagre; free speech was impossible over a lodging-house telephone set in the public hall. Amy, who knew little of Cope’s immediate surroundings at the moment, went on in accents of protest and of grievance, and Cope went on replying in a half-hushed voice as non-committally as he was able. He dwelt more and more on the trying details of his work in words which conveyed no additional information to any fellow-dwellers who might overhear.
“You haven’t been to see me for a week,” came Amy’s voice petulantly, indignantly.
“I’m very sorry, I’m sure,” returned Cope in a carefully generalized tone of suavity. It was successful with the spinster in the side room above, but it was no tone to use with a protesting fiancée.
“Why do you neglect me so?” Amy’s voice proceeded, with no shade of appeasement.
“There is no intention of that,” replied Cope; “—so far as I know,” he added, for ears about or above.
Again Amy’s tone changed. It took on a tang of anger, and also a curious ring of finality—as if, suddenly, a last resolution had been reached. “Good night,” she said abruptly, and the interview was over.
Cope forgot Randolph, and Lemoyne, and his themes. Lemoyne, returning within the hour, found him seated at his desk in self-absorbed depression, his work untouched.
“Well, they’ve taken me,” he began; “and I shall have a fairly good part.” Cope made no effort to respond to the other’s glowing self-satisfaction, but sat with thoughtful, downcast eyes at his desk before the untouched themes. “What’s the matter?” asked Lemoyne. “Has she been calling up again?”
Cope raised his head and gave him a look. Lemoyne saw that his very first guess had been correct.
“This is a gay life!” he broke out; “just the life I have come down here to lead. You’re making yourself miserable, and you’re making me miserable. It’s got to end.”
Cope gave him a second woeful glance.
“Write to her, breaking it off,” prompted Lemoyne. “Draft a letter tonight.”
His mind was full of clichés from his reading and his “scripts.” He had heard all the necessary things said: in fact, had said them himself—now in evening dress, now in hunting costume, now in the loose habiliments of Pierrot—time and time again. The dissatisfied fiancé need but say that he could not feel, after all, that they were as well suited to each other as they ought to be, that he could not bring himself to believe that his feeling for her was what love really should be, and that—
Thus, with a multiplicity of “that’s,” they accomplished a rough draft which might be restudied and used on the morrow. “There!” said Lemoyne to the weary Cope at eleven o’clock; “it ought to have been written a month ago.”
Cope languidly slipped the oft-amended sheet under his pile of themes and in a spent voice suggested bed.
Over night and through the following forenoon the draft lay on his desk. When he returned to his room at three o’clock a note, which had been delivered by hand, awaited him. It was from Amy Leffingwell.
Cope read it, folded his arms on his desk, bowed his head on his arms, and, being alone, gave a half-sob. Then he lifted his head, with face illumined and soul refreshed. Amy had asked for an end to their engagement.
“What does she say?” asked Lemoyne, an hour later.
“She says what you say!” exclaimed Cope with shining eyes and a trace of half-hysteric bravado. “She does not feel that we are quite so well suited to each other as we ought to be, nor that her feeling toward me is what love really … Can she have been in dramatics too!”
“Your letter,” returned Lemoyne, with dignity, “would have been understood.”
“Quite so,” Cope acknowledged, in a kind of exultant excitation. He caught the rough draft from his desk—it was all seared with new emendations—tore it up, and threw the fragments into the wastebasket. “Thank Heaven, I haven’t had to send it!” In a moment, “What am I to write now?” he asked with irony.
“The next will be easier,” returned Lemoyne, still with dignity.
“It will,” replied Cope.
It was—so much easier that it became but an elegant literary exercise. A few touches of nobility, a few more of elegiac regret, and it was ready at nine that night for the letter-box. Cope dropped it in with an iron clang and walked back to his quarters a free man.
A few days later Lemoyne, working for his new play, met Amy Leffingwell in the music-alcove of the University library. She had removed her gloves with their furry wristlets, and he saw that she had a ring on the third finger of her left hand. Its scintillations made a stirring address to his eye.
Cope heard about the ring that evening, and about Amy Leffingwell’s engagement to George Pearson the next day.
He had no desire to dramatize the scene of Pearson’s advance, assault and victory, nor to visualize the setting up of the monument by which that victory was commemorated. Lemoyne did it for him.
Pearson had probably indulged in some disparagement of Cope—a phase on which Lemoyne, as a faithful friend, did not dwell. But he clearly saw George taking Amy’s hand, on which there was still no ring, and declaring that she should be wearing one before tomorrow night. He figured both George and Amy as rather glad that Cope had not given one, and as more and more inclining, with the passage of the days, to the comfortable feeling that there had never been any real engagement at all.
Lemoyne attempted to put some of his visualizings before Cope, but Cope cut him short. “Now I will settle down to work on my thesis,” he said, “and get my degree at the June convocation.”
“Good,” said Lemoyne;
