Louie arranged the birthday dinner in the public dining-room of the hotel, and three of the Professor’s colleagues dined with them on that occasion. Louie had gone out to the university to hear St. Peter lecture, had met some of the faculty, and immediately invited them to dinner. They accepted—when was a professor known to refuse a good dinner? Rosamond was presented with her emeralds, and, as St. Peter afterward observed to his wife, practically all the guests in the dining-room were participants in the happy event. Lillian was doubtless right when she told him that, all the same, his fellow professors went away from the Blackstone that night respecting Godfrey St. Peter more than they had ever done before, and if they had marriageable daughters, they were certainly envying him his luck.
“That,” her husband replied, “is my chief objection to public magnificence; it seems to show everybody up in the worst possible light. I’m not finding fault with anyone but myself, understand. When I consented to occupy an apartment I couldn’t afford, I let myself in for whatever might follow.”
They got back to Hamilton in bitter weather. The lake winds were scourging the town, and Scott had laryngitis and was writing prose poems about the pleasures of tending your own furnace when the thermometer is twenty below.
“Godfrey,” said Mrs. St. Peter when he set off for his classroom on the morning after their return, “surely you’re not going to the old house this afternoon. It will be like a refrigerating-plant. There’s no way of heating your study except by that miserable little stove.”
“There never was, my dear. I got along a good many years.”
“It was very different when the house below was heated. That stove isn’t safe when you keep the window open. A gust of wind might blow it out at any moment, and if you were at work you’d never notice until you were half poisoned by gas. You’ll get a fine headache one of these days.”
“I’ve got headaches that way before, and survived them,” he said stubbornly.
“How can you be so perverse? You know things are different now, and you ought to take more care of your health.”
“Why so? It’s not worth half so much as it was then.”
His wife disregarded this. “And don’t you think it’s a foolish extravagance to go on paying the rent of an entire house, in order to spend a few hours a day in one very uncomfortable room of it?”
The Professor’s dark skin reddened, and the ends of his formidable eyebrows ascended toward his black hair. “It’s almost my only extravagance,” he muttered fiercely.
“How irritable and unreasonable he is becoming!” his wife reflected, as she heard him putting on his overshoes in the hall.
IX
For Christmas day the weather turned mild again. There would be a family dinner in the evening, but St. Peter was going to have the whole day to himself, in the old house. He asked his wife to put him up some sandwiches, so that he needn’t come back for lunch. He kept a few bottles of sherry in his study, in the old chest under the forms. Fortunately he had brought back a great deal of it from his last trip to Spain. It wasn’t foresight—Prohibition was then unthinkable—but a lucky accident. He had gone with his innkeeper to an auction, and bought in a dozen dozens of a sherry that went very cheap. He came home by the City of Mexico and got the wine through without duty.
As he was crossing the park with his sandwiches, he met Augusta coming back from Mass.
“Are you still going to the old house, Professor?” she asked reproachfully, her face smiling at him between her stiff black fur collar and her stiff black hat.
“Oh, yes, Augusta, but it’s not the same. I miss you. There are never any new dresses on my ladies in the evening now. Won’t you come in sometime and deck them out, as a surprise for me? I like to see them looking smart.”
Augusta laughed. “You are a funny man, Doctor St. Peter. If anyone else said the things you do to your classes, I’d be scandalized. But I always tell people you don’t mean half you say.”
“And how do you know what I say to my classes, may I ask?”
“Why, of course, they go out and talk about it when you say slighting things about the Church,” she said gravely.
“But, really, Augusta, I don’t think I ever do.”
“Well, they take it that way. They are not as smart as you, and you ought to be careful.”
“It doesn’t matter. What they think today, they’ll forget tomorrow.” He was walking beside Augusta, with a slack, indifferent stride, very unlike the step he had when he was full of something. “That reminds me: I’ve been wanting to ask you a question. That passage in the service about the Mystical Rose, Lily of Zion, Tower of Ivory—is that the Magnificat?”
Augusta stopped and looked at him. “Why, Professor! Did you receive no religious instruction at all?”
“How could I, Augusta? My mother was a Methodist, there was no Catholic church in our town in Kansas, and I guess my father forgot his religion.”
“That happens, in mixed marriages.” Augusta spoke meaningly.
“Ah, yes, I suppose so. But tell me, what is the Magnificat, then?”
“The Magnificat begins, My soul doth magnify the Lord
; you must know that.”
“But I thought the Magnificat was about the Virgin?”
“Oh, no, Professor! The Blessed Virgin composed the Magnificat.”
St. Peter became intensely interested. “Oh, she did?”
Augusta spoke gently, as if she were prompting him and did not wish to rebuke his ignorance
