Suddenly he thought of Regan, who had intruded his shadow across the path of his personal ambition. Had he really been honest about Regan? Could he not have made him see the advantages of belonging to a sophomore society, if he had really tried? Whereupon Mr. Dink Stover began a long, victorious debate with his conscience, one of those soul-satisfying arguments that always end one way, as conscience is a singularly poor debater when pitted against a resourceful mind.
“Heavens! haven’t I been the best friend he’s had?” he concluded. “Perhaps I might have talked more to him about the sophomore question, but then, I know I never could have changed him. So what’s the odds? I’m democratic and liberal. Didn’t I go to Gimbel and have it out? I can see the other side, too. What the deuce, then, did she mean?”
After another long period of furious tramping, he answered this vexing question in the following irrelevant way: “By George, what an extraordinary girl she is! I must go around again and talk with her. She brushes me up.”
And around he did go, not once, but several times. The first little antagonism between them gradually wore away, and yet he was aware of a certain defensive attitude in her, a judgment that was reserved; and as, by the perfected averaging system of college, he had lost in one short year all the originality and imagination he had brought with him, he was quite at a loss to understand what she found lacking in so important and successful a personage as Mr. John Humperdink Stover.
Naturally, he felt that he was in love. This extraordinary passion came to him in the most sudden and convincing manner. He corresponded, with much physical and mental agony, with what is called a dashing brunette, with whom he had danced eleven dances out of a possible sixteen on the occasion of a house-party in the Christmas vacation, on the strength of which they had exchanged photographs and simulated a confidential correspondence. He had done this because he had plainly perceived it was the thing for a man to do, as one watches the crease in the trousers or exposes a vest a little more daring than the rest. It gave him a sort of reputation among lady-killers that was not distasteful. At Easter he had annexed a blonde, who wrote effusive rolling scrawls and used a noticeable crest. He had done this, likewise, because he wished to be known as a destructive force, as one who rather allowed himself to be loved. But he found the manual labor too taxing. He was cruel and abrupt to the blonde, but he consoled himself by saying to himself that he had restored to the little girl her peace of mind.
On Sunday evening, then, according to tacit agreement, after a pipe had been smoked and the fifth Sunday newspaper had been searched for the third time, McCarthy stretched himself like a cat and said:
“Well, I guess I’ll dash off a few heartthrobs to the dear little things.”
“That reminds me,” said Stover, with an obvious loudness. He took out the last heliotrope envelope and read over the contents which had pleased him so much on the preceding Tuesday. Somehow, it had a different ring—a little too flippant, too facile.
“What the deuce am I going to write her?” he said, inciting his hair to rebellion. He cleaned the pen, and then the inkwell, and wrote on the envelope:
Miss Anita Laurence
It was a name that had particularly attracted him, it was so Spanish and suggestive of serenades. He wrote again at the top of the page:
“Dear Anita.”
Then he stopped.
“What the deuce can I say now?” he repeated crossly.
“By George, I’ve only seen her five times. What is there to say?”
He rose, went to his bureau, and took up the photograph of honor and looked at it long. It was a pretty face, but the ears were rather large. Then he went back, and, tearing up what he had written, closed his desk.
“Hello,” said McCarthy, who was in difficulties. “Aren’t you going to write Anita?”
“I wrote her last night,” said Stover with justifiable mendacity. “I was writing home, but feel rather sleepy.”
As this was unchallengeable, he went to his room and stretched out on the delicious bed.
“I wonder if I’m falling in love with Jean Story?” he said hopefully. “I’m sick to death of Anita calling me by my front name and writing as she does. I’ll bet I’m not the only one, either!” This sublimely ingenious suspicion sufficed for the demise of the dashing brunette from whom he had forced eleven dances out of a possible sixteen. “Jean Story is so different. What the deuce does she want changed in me? I wonder if I could get Bob to give me a bid for a visit this summer?”
The opening to the imagination being thus provided, he went wandering over summer meadows with a certain slender girl who moved as no one else moved and in a dreamy landscape showed him the most marked preference. In the midst of a most delightful and thoroughly satisfactory conversation he fell asleep. When he woke he went straight to his bureau, and, removing the photograph of Anita, consigned it to a humble position in the study amid the crowded beauties that McCarthy termed the harem.
During first recitation, which was an inconsequential voyage into Greece, his imagination jumped the blackboarded walls and went wandering into the realm of the possible summer. A week on the river at the oars, however, drove from him all such imaginings; but at times the vexing question returned, and each Sunday, somehow, he found an opportunity to drop in and have a long talk with Judge Story, of whom he grew surprisingly fond.
The period of duns now set in, and the house on York Street became a place of mystery and signals. McNab, naturally, was the most sought, and he took up a sort of migratory abode on Stover’s window-seat, disappearing
