The Professor’s House

which blankets and winter wraps were yearly stored. It was a headless, armless female torso, covered with strong black cotton, and so richly developed in the part for which it was named that the Professor once explained to Augusta how, in calling it so, she followed a natural law of language, termed, for convenience, metonymy. Augusta enjoyed the Professor when he was risqué, since she was sure of his ultimate delicacy. Though this figure looked so ample and billowy (as if you might lay your head upon its deep-breathing softness and rest safe forever), if you touched it you suffered a severe shock, no matter how many times you had touched it before. It presented the most unsympathetic surface imaginable. Its hardness was not that of wood, which responds to concussion with living vibration and is stimulating to the hand, nor that of felt, which drinks something from the fingers. It was a dead, opaque, lumpy solidity, like chunks of putty, or tightly packed sawdust⁠—very disappointing to the tactile sense, yet somehow always fooling you again. For no matter how often you had bumped up against that torso, you could never believe that contact with it would be as bad as it was.

The second form was more self-revelatory; a full-length female figure in a smart wire skirt with a trim metal waist line. It had no legs, as one could see all too well, no viscera behind its glistening ribs, and its bosom resembled a strong wire birdcage. But St. Peter contended that it had a nervous system. When Augusta left it clad for the night in a new party dress for Rosamond or Kathleen, it often took on a sprightly, tricky air, as if it were going out for the evening to make a great show of being harum-scarum, giddy, folle. It seemed just on the point of tripping downstairs, or on tiptoe, waiting for the waltz to begin. At times the wire lady was most convincing in her pose as a woman of light behaviour, but she never fooled St. Peter. He had his blind spots, but he had never been taken in by one of her kind!

Augusta had somehow got it into her head that these forms were unsuitable companions for one engaged in scholarly pursuits, and she periodically apologized for their presence when she came to install herself and fulfil her “time” at the house.

“Not at all, Augusta,” the Professor had often said. “If they were good enough for Monsieur Bergeret, they are certainly good enough for me.”

This morning, as St. Peter was sitting in his desk chair, looking musingly at the pile of papers before him, the door opened and there stood Augusta herself. How astonishing that he had not heard her heavy, deliberate tread on the now uncarpeted stair!

“Why, Professor St. Peter! I never thought of finding you here, or I’d have knocked. I guess we will have to do our moving together.”

St. Peter had risen⁠—Augusta loved his manners⁠—but he offered her the sewing-machine chair and resumed his seat.

“Sit down, Augusta, and we’ll talk it over. I’m not moving just yet⁠—don’t want to disturb all my papers. I’m staying on until I finish a piece of writing. I’ve seen your uncle about it. I’ll work here, and board at the new house. But this is confidential. If it were noised about, people might begin to say that Mrs. St. Peter and I had⁠—how do they put it, parted, separated?”

Augusta dropped her eyes in an indulgent smile. “I think people in your station would say separated.”

“Exactly; a good scientific term, too. Well, we haven’t, you know. But I’m going to write on here for a while.”

“Very well, sir. And I won’t always be getting in your way now. In the new house you have a beautiful study downstairs, and I have a light, airy room on the third floor.”

“Where you won’t smell smoke, eh?”

“Oh, Professor, I never really minded!” Augusta spoke with feeling. She rose and took up the black bust in her long arms.

The Professor also rose, very quickly. “What are you doing?”

She laughed. “Oh, I’m not going to carry them through the street, Professor! The grocery boy is downstairs with his cart, to wheel them over.”

“Wheel them over?”

“Why, yes, to the new house, Professor. I’ve come a week before my regular time, to make curtains and hem linen for Mrs. St. Peter. I’ll take everything over this morning except the sewing-machine⁠—that’s too heavy for the cart, so the boy will come back for it with the delivery wagon. Would you just open the door for me, please?”

“No, I won’t! Not at all. You don’t need her to make curtains. I can’t have this room changed if I’m going to work here. He can take the sewing-machine⁠—yes. But put her back on the chest where she belongs, please. She does very well there.” St. Peter had got to the door, and stood with his back against it.

Augusta rested her burden on the edge of the chest.

“But next week I’ll be working on Mrs. St. Peter’s clothes, and I’ll need the forms. As the boy’s here, he’ll just wheel them over,” she said soothingly.

“I’m damned if he will! They shan’t be wheeled. They stay right there in their own place. You shan’t take away my ladies. I never heard of such a thing!”

Augusta was vexed with him now, and a little ashamed of him. “But, Professor, I can’t work without my forms. They’ve been in your way all these years, and you’ve always complained of them, so don’t be contrary, sir.”

“I never complained, Augusta. Perhaps of certain disappointments they recalled, or of cruel biological necessities they imply⁠—but of them individually, never! Go and buy some new ones for remind me when it’s All Souls’ day, or Ember day, or Maundy Thursday, or anything?”

Augusta said she must be leaving. St. Peter heard her well-known tread as she descended the stairs. How much she reminded him of, to be sure! She had been most at the house in the days when his daughters were little