“No dinner for me?”
“No. There’s nothing either you or Godfrey will like. It’s Scott’s dinner tonight. Your tastes are so different, I can’t compromise. And this is his, from the cream soup to the frozen pudding.”
“But who said I didn’t like cream soup and frozen pudding?” Louie held out his hands to show their guiltlessness. “And are there haricots verts in cream sauce? I thought so! And I like those, too. The truth is, Dearest,” he stood before her and tapped her chin with his finger, “the truth is that I like all Scott’s dinners, it’s he who doesn’t like mine! He’s the intolerant one.”
“True for you, Louie,” laughed the Professor.
“And it’s that way about lots of things,” said Louie a little plaintively.
“Kitty,” said Scott as they were driving home that night, Kathleen in the driver’s seat beside him, “that silver bracelet Louie spoke of was one of Tom’s trinkets, wasn’t it? Do you suppose she has some feeling for him still, under all this pompuosity?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care. But, oh, Scott, I do love you very much!” she cried vehemently.
He pinched off his driving-glove between his knees and snuggled his hand over hers, inside her muff. “Sure?” he muttered.
“Yes, I do!” she said fiercely, squeezing his knuckles together with all her might.
“Awful nice of you to have told me all about it at the start, Kitty. Most girls wouldn’t have thought it necessary. I’m the only one who knows, ain’t I?”
“The only one who ever has known.”
“And I’m just the one another girl wouldn’t have told. Why did you, Kit?”
“I don’t know. I suppose even then I must have had a feeling that you were the real one.” Her head dropped on his shoulder. “You know you are the real one, don’t you?”
“I guess!”
X
That winter there was a meeting of an Association of Electrical Engineers in Hamilton. Louie Marsellus, who was a member, gave a luncheon for the visiting engineers at the Country Club, and then motored them to Outland. Scott McGregor was at the lunch, with the other newspaper men. On his return he stopped at the university and picked up his father-in-law.
“I’ll run you over home. Which house, the old? How did you get out of Louie’s party?”
“I had classes.”
“It was some lunch! Louie’s a good host. First-rate cigars, and plenty of them,” Scott tapped his breast-pocket. “We had poor Tom served up again. It was all right, of course—the scientific men were interested, didn’t know much about him. Louie called on me for personal recollections; he was very polite about it. I didn’t express myself very well. I’m not much of a speaker, anyhow, and this time I seemed to be talking uphill. You know, Tom isn’t very real to me any more. Sometimes I think he was just a—a glittering idea. Here we are, Doctor.”
Scott’s remark rather troubled the Professor. He went up the two flights of stairs and sat down in his shadowy crypt at the top of the house. With his right elbow on the table, his eyes on the floor, he began recalling as clearly and definitely as he could every incident of that bright, windy spring day when he first saw Tom Outland.
He was working in his garden one Saturday morning, when a young man in a heavy winter suit and a Stetson hat, carrying a grey canvas telescope, came in at the green door that led from the street.
“Are you Professor St. Peter?” he inquired.
Upon being assured, he set down his bag on the gravel, took out a blue cotton handkerchief, and wiped his face, which was covered with beads of moisture. The first thing the Professor noticed about the visitor was his manly, mature voice—low, calm, experienced, very different from the thin ring or the hoarse shouts of boyish voices about the campus. The next thing he observed was the strong line of contrast below the young man’s sandy hair—the very fair forehead which had been protected by his hat, and the reddish brown of his face, which had evidently been exposed to a stronger sun than the spring sun of Hamilton. The boy was fine-looking, he saw—tall and presumably well built, though the shoulders of his stiff, heavy coat were so preposterously padded that the upper part of him seemed shut up in a case.
“I want to go to school here, Professor St. Peter, and I’ve come to ask your advice. I don’t know anybody in the town.”
“You want to enter the university, I take it? What high school are you from?”
“I’ve never been to high school, sir. That’s the trouble.”
“Why, yes. I hardly see how you can enter the university. Where are you from?”
“New Mexico. I haven’t been to school, but I’ve studied. I read Latin with a priest down there.”
St. Peter smiled incredulously. “How much Latin?”
“I read Caesar and Virgil, the Aeneid.”
“How many books?”
“We went right through.” He met the Professor’s questions squarely, his eyes were resolute, like his voice.
“Oh, you did.” St. Peter stood his spade against the wall. He had been digging around his red-fruited thorn-trees. “Can you repeat any of it?”
The boy began: “Infandum, jubes renovare dolorem,” and steadily continued for fifty lines or more, until St. Peter held up a checking hand.
“Excellent. Your priest was a thorough Latinist. You have a good pronunciation and good intonation. Was the Father by any chance a Frenchman?”
“Yes, sir. He was a missionary priest, from Belgium.”
“Did you learn any French from him?”
“No, sir. He wanted to practise his Spanish.”
“You speak Spanish?”
“Not very well, Mexican Spanish.”
The Professor tried him out in Spanish and told him he thought he knew enough to get credit for a modern language. “And what are your deficiencies?”
“I’ve never had any mathematics or science, and I write a very bad hand.”
“That’s not unusual,” St. Peter told him. “But, by the way, how did you happen to come to me instead of to the
