Chapter II: Part 2

"Well, let me by," he said, "and we'll get along to my own room." The resonant bigness of the "gallery" was far removed from the intimate and the sociable.

To the side of this bare place, with its canvases which had become rather démodé--or at least had long ceased to interest--lay two bed-chambers: Foster's own, and one adjoining, which was classed as a spare room. It was sometimes given over to visiting luminaries of lesser magnitudes. Real celebrities--those of national or international fame--were entertained in a sumptuous suite on the floor below. Casual young bachelors, who sometimes happened along, were lodged above and were expected to adjust themselves, as regarded the bathroom, to the use and wont of the occupant adjoining.

Foster's own room was a cramped omnium gatherum, cluttered with the paraphernalia of daily living. It was somewhat disordered and untidy--the chamber of a man who could never see clearly how things were, or be completely sure just what he was about.

"There's Pepys up there," he said, pointing to his bookshelf, as he worked out of his chair and tried to dispose himself comfortably on a couch. "I hope we're going to get along a little farther with him, some time."

"As to that, I _have_ been getting along a little farther;--I've been to the Library, looking somewhat ahead in the completer edition. I find that 'Will,' who flung his cloak over his shoulder, 'like a ruffian,' and got his ears boxed for it, was no mere temporary serving-man, but lived on with Pepys for years and became the most intimate and trusted of his friends. And 'Gosnell,' who lasted three days, you remember, as Mrs. Pepys' maid, turns up a year or two later as an actress at 'the Duke's house.' And 'Deb,' that other maid whose name we have noted farther along--well, there's a deal more about her than exactly tends to edification...."

"Good. I hope we shall have some more of it pretty soon."

"To-day?"

"Not exactly to-day. I've got some other things to think about."

"Such as?"

"Well, I expect you're going to be invited here to dinner pretty soon?"

"So? I've been invited here to dinner before this."

"But another day has come. A new light has risen. I haven't seen it, but I've heard it. I've heard it sing."

"A light singing? Aren't you getting mixed?"

"Oh, I don't know. There was Viollet-le-Duc and the rose-window of Notre Dame. They took him there as a child for a choral service, and he thought it was the rose itself that sang. And there was Petrarch, and the young Milton--both talking about 'melodious tears'--and something of the same sort in 'The Blessed Damosel.' And----"

"A psychological catch for which there ought to be a name. Perhaps there _is_ a name."

"Well, as I say, the light rose, shone, and sang. I didn't see it--I never see anybody. But his voice came up here quite distinctly. It seemed good to have a man in the house. Those everlasting girls--I hope he wasn't bothering to sing for _them_."

"He probably was. How did it go?"

"Very well indeed."

"What kind of voice?"

"Oh, baritone, I suppose you'd call it."

"And he sang sentimental rubbish?"

"Not at all. Really good things."

"With passion?"

"Well, hardly. With cool correctness. An icicle on Diana's temple--that would be my guess."

"An icicle? No wonder the young ladies don't quite fancy him."

"I understand he took them all in a lump--so far as he took them at all. Treated them all exactly alike; Hortense was quite scornful when she brought up my lunch-tray. Of course that's no way for a man to do."

"On the contrary. For certain purposes it might be a very good way."

"'On the contrary,' if you like; since frost may perform the effects of fire. Medora herself is beginning to see him as a tall, white candle, burning in some niche or at some shrine. Sir Galahad--or something of that sort."

Randolph grimaced at this.

"Oh, misery! I hope she hasn't mentioned her impression to _him_! Imagine whether a man would enjoy being told a thing like that. I hope, I'm sure, that no 'Belle Dame sans Merci' will get on his tracks!"

"If he goes in too much for 'palely loitering' he may be snatched."

"Poor fellow! They'd better leave him to his studies and his students. He has his own way to make, I presume, and will need all his energies to get ahead. For, as some one has said, 'There are no tea-houses on the road to Parnassus.' Neither do tea-fights boost a man toward the Porch or Academe."

"He's going in for teas?"

"I won't say that. But it was at a tea that I met him. A trigonometry tea at little Mrs. Ryder's."

"You've seen him then. You have the advantage of me. What's he like?"

"Oh, he has points in his favor. He has looks; a trim figure, even if spare; well-squared shoulders; and manners with a breezy, original tang. The kind of young fellow that people are likely enough to like."

"What kind of manners did he have for you?"

"Well, there you rather get me. He called me 'sir,' with a touch of deference; yet somehow I felt as if I were standing too close to an electric fan."

"Yes, even when they indulge a show of deference, they contrive to blow our gray hairs about our wrinkled temples."

"Don't talk about gray hairs. You have none; and mine are not always seen at first glance."

"Medora begins to tax me with a few. Don't you see any?"

"Not one. I concentrate on my own. Tush, you're only forty-seven."

"Or fifty-seven, or sixty-seven, or seventy-seven...." Foster adjusted his green shade and attempted an easier disposition of his twisted limbs on the couch. "Well, forty-seven, as you suggest,--as you insist. How old is this young fellow?"

"Twenty-four or twenty-five."

"Well, they can make us seem either younger or older. That rests with ourselves. It's all in how we take them, I expect."

"Better take them so as to make ourselves younger."

"Then the other question."

"How they take us?"

"Yes. We're lucky, in this day and generation, if they take us at all."

"You may be right," assented Randolph ruefully. "Yet there are gleams of hope. The more thoughtful among them have a kind of condescending pity to bestow----"

"And the thoughtless?"

"They can find uses for us. One of the faculty was telling me how he tried to give two or three of his juniors an outing at his cottage over in Michigan. Everything he gave they took for granted. And if anything was lacking they took--exceptions. Monopolized the boats; ignored the dinner-hour.... Sometimes I think that even the thoughtless are thoughtful in their own way and use us, if we happen to have lands and substance, purely as practical conveniences. I've been almost glad to think that I possess none myself."

"Don't stay here and talk like that. This is one of my blue days."

"I wish I had brought a novelette. Sure you don't want to hear a little more about the Countess of Castlemaine and the rascalities of the Navy Office?"

"No; some other time, when I feel a bit more robust. It isn't every day that the mind can digest such a period with comfort."

"Are we two old fogies beginning to wear on each other?"

"I hope not. But when you go down, stop for Medora a minute and see if she hasn't got something to say."

Medora--when he finally got down stairs--had.

She laid some knitting on the drawing-room table and came out into the hall.

"No reading this afternoon, I judge. What I heard, or seemed to hear, was a broken flow of talk."

"No reading. Restless."

"So I was afraid. I'd rather have one good steady voice purring along for him, and then I know he's all right. Carolyn has been too busy lately. What seems to have unsettled him?"

"Oh, I don't know. Young life, possibly."

"Well, I've asked and asked the girls not to be quite so gay and chattery in the upper halls."

"You can't keep girls quiet."

"I don't want to--not everywhere and at all times."

"I have an idea that a given number of girls make more noise in a house than the same number of young fellows. I know that they do in boarding-houses and rooming-houses, and I believe it's so as between sororities and fraternities. Put a noise-gauge in the main hall of the Alpha-Alpha house and another in the main hall of the Beta-Beta house, and the girls would run the score above the boys every time. If ever I build a sorority house, it will be for the Delta-Iota-Nus, and a statue of the great goddess DIN herself shall stand just within the entrance."

"You discourage me. I was going to give a dinner."

"Go ahead. A few remarks from me won't stop the course of your hospitality. Neither would a few orations. Neither would a few deliberative bodies assembled for a month of sessions, with every member talking from nine till six."

"You think I indulge in too many?"

"Too many what? Festivals? Puns?"

Medora paused, a bit puzzled.

"Puns? Why, I never, never----Oh, I see!"

"Too many dinners? No. Who could?"

"This one was to be a young people's dinner. I was going to invite you."

"Thanks. Thanks. Thanks."

"Still, if you think my girls are noisy...."

"I was speaking of girls in numbers."

"Well, Bertram Cope didn't find them so."

"Why not?"

"Why not, indeed? They collected in a silent little group behind my sofa...."

"Puzzled? Awed?"

"Fudge! Well, save Thursday."

"Is he coming?"

"I trust so."

"Then they do need a constabulary to keep them quiet?"

"Oh, hush!"

"How many are you expecting to have? You know I don't enjoy large parties."

"Could you stand ten?"

"I think so."

"Thursday, then," she said, with a definitive hand on the knob of the door.

Randolph went down the front walk with a slight stir of elation--a feeling that had come to be an infrequent visitor enough. He hoped that the company would be not only predominantly youthful, but exclusively so--aside from the hostess and himself. And even she often had her young days and her young spots. It would doubtless be clamorous; yet clamor, understood and prepared for, might be met with composure.

6

_COPE DINES--AND TELLS ABOUT IT_

Cope pushed away the last of the themes and put the cork back in the red-ink bottle. Here was a witless girl who seemed to think that Herrick and Cowper were contemporaries. The last sense to develop in the Western void was apparently the sense of chronology--unless, indeed, it were a sense for the shades of difference which served to distinguish between one age and another and provided the raw material that made chronology a matter of consequence at all.

"If there were only one more," muttered Cope, looking at the pile of sheets under the gas-globe, "I should probably learn that Chaucer derived from Beaumont and Fletcher."

He reached up and jerked the gas-jet to a different angle. The flame lit, through its nicked, pale-pink globe, a bedroom cramped in size and meagre in furnishings: a narrow bed, dressed to look like a lounge; two stiff-backed oak chairs, not lately varnished; a bookshelf overhead, with some dozen of the more indispensable aids to our tongue's literature. The table at which he sat was one of plain deal, covered with some Oriental-seeming fabric which showed here and there inkspots that antedated his own pen. He threw up this covering as it fell over the front edge of the table, pulled out a drawer, laid a sheet of paper in the bettered light, and uncorked a black-ink bottle.

"Dear Arthur," he began.

He looked across to the other chair, with its broken spindles and obfuscated varnish. With things as he wanted them, his correspondent would be sitting there and letter-writing would be unnecessary.

"Dear Arthur," he repeated aloud, and set himself to a general sketch of the new land and the "lay" of it.

"Three-quarters of them are of course girls," he presently found himself writing, "which is the common proportion almost everywhere, I presume, except in engineering and dentistry. However, there are four or five men. I've been pretty careful, and they still treat me with respect. I'm afraid my course is regarded as a 'snap.' Everybody, it seems, can grasp English literature (and produce it). And almost anybody, I begin to fear, can teach it. Judging, that is, from the pay. I'm afraid the good folks at Freeford will find themselves pinched for another year still."

He glanced across toward the pile of corrected themes. He felt that not everybody was "called," as a matter of course, to write English, and he stubbornly nourished the belief that toiling over others' imperfections was more of a job than boards of trustees always realized.

"Of course," he presently resumed, "things are rather changed from what they were before. I find more in the way of social opportunities and greater interest shown by the middle-aged. It is no disadvantage to cultivate people who have their own homes; the lunch-rooms round the fountain-square are numerous enough, but not so good as they might be. And I don't know but that an instructor may lose caste by eating among a miscellany of undergraduates. Anyhow, it's no plan to pursue for long."

He sat for a moment, lost in thought over recent social experiences.

"One very good house has lately been opened to me," he continued. "I dined there last Thursday evening. It's really quite a mansion--a great many large rooms: picture-gallery, ballroom, and all that; and the dinner itself was very handsomely done. You know my theory,--a theory rather forced upon me, in truth, by circumstances,--that the best way to enjoy a good meal is to have had a string of poor ones. Well, since coming back, and with no permanent arrangements made, I have had plenty of chance for getting into position to appreciate the really first-class. There was a color-scheme in pale pink--ribbons of that color, pink icing on the cakes, and so on. The same thing could be done, and done charmingly, in light green--with pistache ice-cream. Of course the candle-shades were pink too."

His eye wandered toward a small triangular closet, made off from the room by a flimsy and faded calico-print curtain.

"I had my dress-suit cleaned and pressed, but the lapels of the coat came out rather shiny, and I thought it better to hire one for the occasion. There was no trouble about a fit--I have standardized shoulders, as you know.

"Of course I miss you all the time, and I assuredly missed you just here. If it is really true, as you write, that you are holding your summer gains and weigh twelve pounds more than you did at the end of June, and if you are thinking of getting a new suit, please bear in mind that my own won't last much longer. I have the chance, now, to go out a good deal and to meet influential, worth-while people. In the circumstances I ask you not to bant. One rather spare man in a pair of men is enough.

"My hostess, a Mrs. Phillips, I met at a tea during my first week. This tea was given by a lady in the mathematical department, and she and her husband were at the dinner. They are people in the early or middle thirties, I judge, and were probably put in as a connecting link between the two sections of the party. Mrs. Phillips herself is a rich widow of forty-odd--forty-five or six, possibly,--though I am not the very best judge in such matters: no need to tell you that, on such a point, my eye and my general sense are none too acute. The only other middle-aged (or elderly) person present was a Mr. Randolph, who is perhaps fifty, or a little beyond, yet who appears to have his younger moments. There were some girls, and there were two young men in business in the city--neighbors and not connected with the University at all. 'For which relief,' etc.,--since it _is_ a bit benumbing to move in academic circles exclusively;--I should hate to feel that a really professorial manner was stealing over me. Well, everybody was lively and gay, except at first Ryder (he's the math. man); but even he limbered up finally. Mrs. Phillips herself has a great deal of action and vivacity--seemed hardly more than thirty. Well, I could be pretty gay too with a lot of money behind me; and I think that, for another year or so, I can contrive to be gay without it. But after that....

"I wish you had been there instead of Ryder. If you are really going to be twenty-seven in November--as I figure it--you might yourself have served as a connecting link between youth and age. No, no; I take it back; I didn't mean it. I wouldn't have you seem older for anything, and you know it.

"There were three girls. They all live in the house itself, forming a little court: Mrs. P. seems to need young life and young attentions. So not one of them had to be taken home--there's usually _that_ to do, you know. Not that it would have mattered much, as the distances would have been short and the night was clear starlight. But they could all stay where they were, and I walked home in quite different company."

Cope threw back his Oriental table-cover once more and drew out a few additional sheets of paper.

"One of them is an artist. She paints portraits, and possibly other things. Oh, I was going to say there is an art-gallery at the top of the house. Her husband--I mean Mrs. Phillips'--was a painter and collector himself; and after dinner we went up there, and a curious man came in, propelling a wheeled chair--a sort of death's-head at the feast.... But don't let me get too far away from the matter in hand. She is dark and a bit tonguey--the artist-girl; and I believe she would be sarcastic and witty if she weren't held down pretty well. I think she's a niece: the relationship leaves her free, as I suppose she feels, to express herself. If you like the type you may have it; but wit in a woman, or even humor, always makes me uncomfortable. The feminine idea of either is a little different from ours.

"Another girl is a musician. She plays the violin--quite tolerably. Yes, yes, I recall your views about violin-playing: it's either good or bad--nothing between. I'll say this, then: she played some simple and unpretentious things and did them very deftly. Simple, unpretentious: oddest thing in the world, for she is a recent graduate of our school of music and began this fall as an instructor. Wouldn't you have expected to find her demanding a chance to perform a sonata at the least, or pining miserably for a concerto with full orchestra? Well, this young lady I put down as a plain boarder--you can't maintain a big house on memories and a collection of paintings. She's a nice child, and I dare say makes as good a boarder as any nice child could.

"The third girl--if you want to hear any more about them--seems to be a secretary. Think of having the run of a house where a social secretary is required! I'm sure she sends out the invitations and keeps the engagement-book. Besides all that, she writes poetry--she is the minstrel of the court. She does verses about her chatelaine--is quite the mistress of self-respecting adulation. _She_ would know the difference between Herrick and Cowper!"...

Cope pulled out his watch. Then he resumed.

"It's half past ten, but I think I'll run on for a few moments longer. If I don't finish, I can wind up to-morrow.--Mr. Randolph sat opposite me. He looked at me a lot and gave attention to whatever I said--whether said to him, or to my neighbors right and left, or to the whole table. I didn't feel him especially clever, but easy and pleasant--and friendly. Also a little shy--even after we had gone up to the ball-room. I'm afraid that made me more talkative than ever; you know how shyness in another man makes me all the more confident and rackety. Be sure that voice of mine rang out! But not in song. There was a piano up stairs, of course, and that led to a little dancing. Different people took turns in playing. I danced--once--with each of the three girls, and twice with my hostess; then I let Ryder and the two young business-men do the rest. Randolph danced once with Mrs. Phillips, and that ended it for him. My own dancing, as you know, is nothing to brag of: I think the young ladies were quite satisfied with the little I did. I'm sure _I_ was. You also know my views on round dances. Why dancing should be done exclusively by couples arranged strictly on the basis of contrasted sexes...! I think of the good old days of the Renaissance in Italy, when women, if they wanted to dance, just got up and danced--alone, or, if they didn't want to dance alone, danced together. I like to see soldiers or sailors dance in pairs, as a straightforward outlet for superfluous physical energy. Also, peasants in a ring--about a Maypole or something. Also, I very much like square dances and reels. There were enough that night for a quadrille, with somebody for the piano and even somebody to 'call off,'--but whoever sees a quadrille in these days? However, I mustn't burn any more gas on this topic.

"I sat out several dances between Mrs. Phillips and Mr. Randolph. He thought he had done enough for her, and she thought I had done enough for them all. And one of the young business-men did enough for that springy, still-young Mrs. Ryder. Once, indeed, Mrs. Phillips asked me if I wouldn't like to try a third dance with her (she goes at it with a good deal of old-time vivacity and vim); but I told her she must know by this time that I was something of a bungler. 'I wouldn't quite say that,' she returned, smiling; but we continued to sit there side by side on a sort of bench built against the wall, and she seemed as well pleased to have it that way as the other. She did, however, speak about a little singing. I told her that she must have found me something of a bungler there, too, and reminded her that I couldn't play the accompaniments of my best songs at all. Arthur, my dear boy, I depend on _you_ for that, and you must come down here and do it. No singing, then. But Mrs. Phillips was not quite satisfied. Wouldn't I recite something? Heavens! Well, of course I know lots of poems--_c'est mon metier_. I repeated one. Then other volunteers were called upon--it was entertaining with a vengeance! The young ladies had to chip in also--though they, of course, were prepared to. And one of the young business-men did some clever juggling; and Mrs. Ryder sang a little French ballade; and Mr. Randolph--poor man!--was suddenly routed out of his placidity, and responded as well as he could with one or two little stories, not very pointed and not very well told. But I judge he makes no great claim to being a _raconteur_--he was merely paying an unexpected tax as gracefully as he could.

"Well, as I was saying, the man in the wheeled chair came in. Of course he hadn't been down to dinner--I think I saw a tray for him carried along the hall. As he was working his way through the door, I suppose I must have been talking and laughing at my loudest; and that big, bare room, done in hard wood, made me seem noisier still. He sort of stopped and twitched, and appeared to shrink back in his chair: I presume my tones went straight through the poor twisted invalid's head. He must have fancied me (from the racket I was making) as a sort of free-and-easy Hercules (which is not quite the case), if not as the whole football squad rolled into one. Whether he really saw me, then or thereafter, I don't know; he wore a sort of green shade over his eyes. Of course I met him in due form. I tried not to give his poor hand too much of a wring (another of my bad habits); but he took all I gave and even seemed to hang on for a little more. He sat quietly to one side for a while, and I tried not to act the bull of Bashan again. Anyhow, he didn't start a second time. Presently he pulled out rather unceremoniously: the two young business-men had begun a sort of burlesque fandango, and their feet were pretty noisy on the bare floor. He started off after looking toward the piano and then toward me; and Mrs. Phillips glanced about as if to hint that any display of surprise or of indulgence would be misplaced. Poor chap!--well, I'm glad he didn't see me dancing.

"We broke up about eleven, and Mr. Randolph suggested that, as we lived in the same general direction, we might walk homeward together. Great heaven! it's eleven--and five after--now! Enough, in all conscience, for to-night. You shall have the rest to-morrow."

7

_COPE UNDER SCRUTINY_

An evening or two later Cope again corked his red ink and uncorked his black.

"As I have said, Mr. Randolph and I walked home together. He stopped for a moment in front of his place. Another large, handsome house. He told me he had the use of his quarters as long as his landlord's lease ran, and asked me to come round some time and see how he was fixed. Then he said suddenly that the evening was fine and the night young and that he would walk on with me to _my_ quarters, if I didn't mind. Of course I didn't--he seemed so friendly and pleasant; but I let him learn for himself that I was far from being lodged in any architectural monument. Well, we went on for the necessary ten minutes, and he didn't seem at all put out by the mediocre aspect of the house where I have put up. He sort of took it all for granted--as if he knew about it already. In fact, on the way from his place to mine, I no more led him (as I sense it now) than he led me. He hesitated at no corner or crossing. 'I am an old Churchtonian,' he said incidentally--as if he knew everything and everybody. He also mentioned, just as incidentally, that he had a brother-in-law on our board of trustees. Of course I promised to go round and see him. I presume that I shall drop in on him some time or other. Come down here, and you shall have one more house of call.

"He stopped for a moment in front of my diggings, taking my hand to say goodnight and taking his own time in dropping it. Enough is enough. 'You have the small change needed for paying your way through society,' he said, with a sort of smile. 'I must cultivate a few little arts myself,' he went on; 'they seem necessary in some houses. But I'm glad, after all, that I didn't remember to-night that a tribute was likely to be levied; it would have taken away my appetite and have made the whole evening a misery in advance. As things went, I had, on the whole, a pleasant time. Only, I understood that you sang; and I was rather hoping to hear you.' 'I do best with my regular accompanist,' I returned--meaning you, of course. I hope you don't mind being degraded to that level. 'And your regular accompanist is not--not----?' 'Is miles away,' I replied. 'A hundred and fifty of them,' I might have added, if I had chosen to be specific. Now, if he had wanted to hear me, why hadn't he asked? He would have needed only to second Mrs. Phillips herself; and there he was, just on the other side of me. In consequence of his reticence I was driven--or drove myself--to blank verse. And that other man, the one in the chair; he may have had his expectations too. Arthur, Arthur, try to grasp the situation! You must come down here, and you must bring your hands with you. Tell the bishop and the precentor that you are needed elsewhere. They will let you off. Of course I know that a village choir needs every tenor it can get--and keep; but come. If they insist, leave your voice behind; but do bring your hands and your reading eye. Don't let me go along making my new circle think I'm an utter dub. Tell your father plainly that he can never in the world make a wholesale-hardware-man out of you. Force him to listen to reason. What is one year spent in finding out just what you are fit for? Come along; I miss you like the devil; nobody does my things as sympathetically as you do. Give up your old anthems and your old tinware and tenpennies and come along. I can bolt from this hole at a week's notice, and we can go into quarters together: a real bed instead of an upholstered shelf, and a closet big enough for two wardrobes (if mine really deserves the name). We could get our own breakfast, and you could take a course in something or other till you found out just what the Big Town could do for you. In any event you would be bearing me company, and your company is what I need. So pack up and appear."

The delay in the posting of this appeal soon brought from Winnebago a letter outside the usual course of correspondence. It was on a fresh sheet and under a new date-line that Cope continued. After a page of generalities and of attention to particular points in the letter from Wisconsin, Cope took up his own line of thought.

"I had meant, of course, to look in on him within a few days,--no great hurry about it. But on Sunday evening he wrote and asked if he might not call round on me instead. My name is not in the telephone-book; neither, as I found out, was his. So I used up a sheet of paper, an envelope, and a stamp--just such as I am now using on you--to tell him that he might indeed. I put in the 'indeed' for cordiality, hoping he wouldn't think I had slighted _his_ invitation. On Monday evening he came round--I must have reached him by the late afternoon delivery. Need I say that he had to take this poor place as he found it? But there was no sign of the once-over--no tendency to inventory or appraise. He sat down beside me on the couch just as if he had no notion that it was a bed (and a rather rocky one, at that), and talked about my row of books, and about music and plays, and about his own collection of curios--all in a quiet, contained way, yet intent on me if not on my outfit. Well, it's pleasant to be considered for what you are rather than for what you have (or for what few poor sticks your landlady may have); and I rather liked his being here. Certainly he was a change from my students, who sometimes seem to exclude better timber.

"Needless to say, he repeated his invitation, and last evening I shunted Middle English (in which I have a lot to catch up) and walked round to him. Very adequately and handsomely lodged. Really good bachelor quarters (I hadn't known for certain whether he was married or not). A stockbroker of a sort, I hear,--but not enough to hurt, I should guess. He has a library and a sitting-room. Like me, he sleeps three-quarters, but he doesn't have to sit on his bed in the daytime. And he has a bathrobe of just the sort I shall have, when I can afford it. He has got together a lot of knick-knacks and curios, but takes them lightly.

"'Sorry I've only one big arm-chair,' he said, handing me his cigarette-case and settling me down in comfort; 'but I entertain very seldom. I should like to be hospitable,' he went on; '--I really think it's in me; but that's pretty much out of the question here. I have no chef, no dining-room of my own, no ball-room, certainly.... Perhaps, before very long, I shall have to make a change.'

"He asked me about Freeford, and I didn't realize until I was on my way back that he had assumed my home town just as he had assumed my lodging. Well, all right; I never resent a friendly interest. He sat in a less-easy chair and blew his smoke-rings and wondered if I had been a small-town boy. 'I'm one, too,' he said; '--at least Churchton, forty years--at least Churchton, thirty years ago, was not all it is to-day. It has always had its own special tone, of course; but in my young--in my younger days it was just a large country village. Fewer of us went into town to make money, or to spend it.'...

"And then he asked me to go into town, one evening soon, and help him spend some. He suggested it rather shyly; _à tâtons_, I will say--though French is not my business. He offered a dinner at a restaurant, and the theatre afterwards. Did I accept? Indeed I did. Think, Arthur! after all the movies and restaurants round the elms and the fountain (tho' you don't know them yet)! I will say, too, that his cigarettes were rather better than my own....

"I suppose he is fully fifty; but he has his young days, I can see. Certainly his age doesn't obtrude,--doesn't bother me at all, though he sometimes seems conscious of it himself. He wears eye-glasses part of the time,--for dignity, I presume. He had them on when I came in, but they disappeared almost at once, and I saw them no more.

"He asked me about my degree,--though I didn't remember having spoken of it. I couldn't but mention 'Shakespeare'--as the word goes; and you know that when I mention him, it always makes the other man mention Bacon. He did mention Bacon, and smiled. 'I've studied the cipher,' he said. 'All you need to make it go is a pair of texts--a long one and a short one--and two fonts of type, or their equivalent in penmanship. Two colors of ink, for example. You can put anything into anything. See here.' He reached up to a shelf and brought down a thin brown square note-book. 'Here's the alphabet,' he said; 'and here'--opening a little beyond--'is my use of it: one of my earliest exercises. I have put the first stanza of "Annabel Lee" into the second chapter of "Tom Jones."' He ignored the absent eye-glasses and picked out the red letters from the black with perfect ease. 'Simplest thing in the world,' he went on; 'anybody can do it. All it needs is time and patience and care. And if you happen to be waggishly or fraudulently inclined you can give yourself considerable entertainment--and can entertain or puzzle other people later. You don't really believe that "Bacon wrote Shakespeare"?'

"Of course I don't, Arthur,--as you very well know. I picked out the first line of 'Annabel Lee' by arranging the necessary groupings among the odd mixture of black and red letters he exhibited, and told him I didn't believe that Bacon wrote Shakespeare--nor that Shakespeare did either. 'Who did, then?' he naturally asked. I told him that I would grant, at the start and for a few seasons, a group of young noblemen and young gentlemen; but that some one of them (supposing there to have been more than that one) soon distanced all the rest and presently became the edifice before which the manager from Stratford was only the facade. He--this 'someone'--was a noble and a man of wide reach both in his natural endowments and in his acquired culture. But he couldn't dip openly into the London cesspool; he had his own quality to safeguard against the contamination of a new and none too highly-regarded trade. 'I don't care for your shillings,' he said to Shaxper, 'nor for the printed plays afterward; but I do value your front and your footing and the services they can render me on my way to self-expression.' He was an earl, or something such, with a country-seat in Warwick, or on the borders of Gloucestershire; 'and if I only had a year and the money to make a journey among the manor-houses of mid-England,' I said, 'and to dig for a while in their muniment-rooms....' Well, you get the idea, all right enough.

"He came across and sat on the arm of the big easy-chair. 'If you went over there and discovered all that, the English scholars would never forgive you.' As of course they wouldn't: look at the recent Shaxper discoveries by Americans in London! 'And wouldn't that be a rather sensational thesis,' he went on, 'from a staid candidate for an M.A., or a Ph.D., or a Litt.D., or whatever it is you're after?' It would, of a verity; and why shouldn't it be? 'Don't go over there,' he ended with a smile, as he dropped his hand on my shoulder; 'your friends would rather have you here.' 'Never fear!' I returned; 'I can't possibly manage it. I shall just do something on "The Disjunctive Conjunctions in 'Paradise Lost,'" and let it go at that!'

"He got up to reach for the ash-receiver. 'They tell me,' he said, 'that a degree isn't much in itself--just an _étape_ on the journey to a better professional standing.' 'Yes,' said I, '--and to better professional rewards. It means so many more hundreds of dollars a year in pay.' But you know all about that, too.

"I'm glad your dramatic club is getting forward so well with the rehearsals for its first drive of the season; glad too that, this time at least, they have given you a good part. Tell me all about it before the big stars in town begin to dim your people in my eyes--and in your own; and don't let them cast you for the next performance in January. You will be here by then.

"Yours,

"B.L.C."

8

_COPE UNDERTAKES AN EXCURSION_

Two or three days later, Randolph met Medora Phillips in front of the bank. This was a neat and solemn little edifice opposite the elms and the fountain; it was neighbored by dry-goods stores, the offices of renting agencies, and the restaurants where the unfraternized undergraduates took their daily chances. Through its door passed tradesmen's clerks with deposits, and young housewives with babies in perambulators, and students with their small financial problems, and members of the faculty about to cash large or small checks. Mrs. Phillips had come across from the dry-goods store to pick up her monthly sheaf of vouchers,--it was the third of October.

"Don't you want to come in for a minute?" she asked Randolph. "Then you can walk on with me to the stationer's. Carolyn tells me that our last batch of invitations reduced us to nothing. How did _your_ dinner go?"

Randolph followed her into the cool marble interior. "Oh, in town, you mean? Quite well, I think. I'm sure my young man took a good honest appetite with him!"

"I know. We don't do half enough for these poor boys."

"Yes, he rose to the food. But not to the drinks. I took him, after all, to my club. I innocently suggested cocktails; but, no. He declined--in a deft but straightforward way. Country principles. Small-town morals. He made me feel like a--well, like a corrupter of youth."

"You didn't mind, though,--of course you didn't. You liked it. Wasn't it noble! Wasn't it charming! So glad that _we_ had nothing but Apollinaris and birch beer! Still, it would have been a pleasure to hear him refuse."

The receiving-teller gave her her vouchers. She put them in her handbag and somehow got round a perambulator, and the two went out on the street.

"And how did your 'show' go?" she continued. "That's about as much as we can call the drama in these days."

"That, possibly, didn't go quite so well. I took him to a 'comedy,'--as they nowadays call their mixture of farce and funniment. 'Comedy'!--I wish Meredith could have seen it! Well, he laughed a little, here and there,--obligingly, I might say. But there was no 'chew' in the thing for him,--nothing to fill his intellectual maw. He's a serious youngster, after all,--exuberant as he seems. I felt him appraising me as a gay old irresponsible...."

"'Old'--you are not to use that word. Come, don't say that he--that he venerated you!"

"Oh, not at all. During the six hours we were together--train, club, theatre, and train again--he never once called me 'sir'; he never once employed our clumsy, repellent Anglo-Saxon mode of address, 'mister'; in fact, he never employed any mode of address at all. He got round it quite cleverly,--on system, as I soon began to perceive; and not for a moment did he forget that the system was in operation. He used, straight through, a sort of generalized manner--I might have been anywhere between twenty and sixty-five."

They were now in front of the stationer's show-window, and there were few people in the quiet thoroughfare to jostle them.

Medora smiled.

"How clever; how charming!" she said. "Leaving you altogether free to pick your own age. I hope you didn't go beyond thirty-five. You must have been quite charming in your early thirties."

"That's kind of you, I'm sure; but I don't believe that I was ever 'charming' at _any_ age. I think you've used that word once too often. I was a quiet, studious lad, with nice notions, but possibly something of a prig. I was less 'charming' than correct. The young ladies had the greatest confidence in me,--not one of them was ever 'afraid'."

"Why, how horrid! How utterly unsatisfactory! Nor their mothers?"

"No. And I'm still single, as you're advised. And I'm not sure that the young gentlemen cared much more for me. If I had had a little more 'gimp' and _verve_, I might have equalled the particular young gentleman of whom we have been discoursing. But...."

His obviously artificial style of speech concealed, as she guessed, some real feeling.

"Oh, if you insist on disparaging yourself...!"

"I was quite as coolly correct as I apprehend him to be; and if I could only have contrived to compass the charming, as well, who knows what----?"

"You don't like my word. Is there a better, a more suitable?"

"No. You have the _mot juste_."

He threw a finger through the wide pane of glass. "Is that the sort of thing you are after? Those boxes of pale gray are rather good."

"I never buy from the show-window. Come in, and help me choose."

"I love to shop," he said, in a mock ecstasy. "With others," he added. "I like to follow money in--and to contribute taste and experience."

Over the stationer's counter she said:

"Save Sunday. We are going out to the sand-hills."

"Thank you. Very well. Most glad to."

"And you are to bring him."

"Him?"

"Bertram Cope."

"Why, I've given him six hours within two or three days. And now you're asking me to give him sixteen."

"Sixteen--or more. But you're not giving them to him. You're giving them to all of us. You're giving them to me. The day is likely to be fine and settled, and I'd recommend your catching the 8:30 train. I shall have my full load in the car. And more, if I have to take along Helga. Try to reach us by one, or a quarter past."

Mrs. Phillips had lately taken on a house among the sand dunes beyond the state line. This singular region had recently acquired so wide a reputation for utter neglect and desolation that--despite its distance from town, whether in miles or in hours--no one could quite afford to ignore it. Picnics, pageants, encampments and excursions all united in proclaiming its remoteness, its silence, its vacuity. Along the rim of ragged slopes which put a term to the hundreds of miles of water that spread from the north, people tramped, bathed, canoed, motored and week-ended. Within a few seasons Duneland had acquired as great a reputation for "prahlerische Dunkelheit"--for ostentatious obscurity--as ever was enjoyed even by Schiller's Wallenstein. "Lovers of Nature" and "Friends of the Landscape" moved through its distant and inaccessible purlieus in squads and cohorts. Everybody had to spend there at least one Sunday in the summer season. There were enthusiasts whose interest ran from March to November. There were fanatics who insisted on trips thitherward in January. And there were one or two super-fanatics--ranking ahead even of the fishermen and the sand-diggers--who clung to that weird and changing region the whole year through.

Medora Phillips' house was several miles beyond the worst of the hurly-burly. There were no tents in sight, even in August. Nor was the honk of the motor-horn heard even during the most tumultuous Sundays. The spot was harder to reach than most others along the twenty miles of nicked and ragged brim which helped enclose the wide blue area of the Big Water, but was better worth while when you got there. Her little tract lay beyond the more prosaic reaches that were furnished chiefly in the light green of deciduous trees; it was part of a long stretch thickly set for miles with the dark and sombre green of pines. Our nature-lover had taken, the year before, a neglected and dilapidated old farmhouse and had made it into what her friends and habitues liked to call a bungalow. The house had been put up--in the rustic spirit which ignores all considerations of landscape and outlook--behind a well-treed dune which allowed but the merest glimpse of the lake; however, a walk of six or eight minutes led down to the beach, and in the late afternoon the sun came with grand effect across the gilded water and through the tall pine-trunks which bordered the zig-zag path. Medora had added a sleeping porch, a dining-porch and a lean-to for the car; and she entertained there through the summer lavishly, even if intermittently and casually.

"No place in the world like it!" she would declare enthusiastically to the yet inexperienced and therefore the still unconverted. "The spring arrives weeks ahead of our spring in town, and the fall lingers on for weeks after. Come to our shore, where the fauna and flora of the whole country meet in one. All the wild birds pass in their migrations; and the flowers!" Then she would expatiate on the trailing arbutus in April, and the vast sheets of pale blue lupines in early June, and the yellow, sunlike blossoms of the prickly-pear in July, and the red glories of painter's-brush and bittersweet and sumach in September. "No wonder," she would say, "that they have to distribute handbills on the excursion-trains asking people to leave the flowers alone!"

"How shocking!" Cope had cried, with his resonant laugh, when this phase of the situation was brought to his attention. "Are the automobile people any better?"

Randolph had told him of some of the other drawbacks involved in the excursion. "It's a long way to go, even when you pass up the trolley and make a single big bolt by train. And it leads through an industrial region that is mighty unprepossessing--little beauty until almost the end. And even when you get there, it may all seem a slight and simple affair for the time and trouble taken--unless you really like Nature. And lastly," he said, with a sidelong glance at Cope, "you may find yourself, as the day wears on, getting a little too much of my company."

"Oh, I hope that doesn't mean," returned Cope, with another ingenuous unchaining of his native resonance, "that you are afraid of getting a little too much of mine! I'm fond of novelty, and nobody can frighten me."

"If that's the case, let's get away as early in the day as we can. Breakfasts, of course, are late in every household on Sunday. So let's meet at the Maroon-and-Purple Tavern at seven-thirty, and make a flying start at eight."

Sunday morning came clear and calm and warm to the town,--a belated September day, or possibly an early intimation of Indian summer,--and it promised to be even more delightful in the favored region toward which our friends were journeying. After they had cleared many miles of foundries and railroad crossings, and had paralleled for a last half-hour a distant succession of sandhills, wooded or glistening white, they were set down at a small group of farmhouses, with a varied walk of five miles before them. Half a mile through a shaded country lane; another half-mile along a path that led across low, damp ground through thickets of hazel and brier; a third half-mile over a light soil, increasingly sandy, beneath oaks and lindens and pines which cloaked the outlines of the slopes ahead; and finally a great mound of pure sand that slanted up into a blue sky and made its own horizon.

"We've taken things easy," said Randolph, who had been that way before, "and I hope we have enough breath left for our job. There it lies, right in front of us."

"No favor asked here," declared Cope. He gave a sly, sidewise glance, as if to ask how the other might stand as to leg-muscles and wind.

"Up we go," said Randolph.

9

_COPE ON THE EDGE OF THINGS_

The adventurer in Duneland hardly knows, as he works his way through one of the infrequent "blow-outs," whether to thank Nature for her aid or to tax her with her cruelty. She offers few other means of reaching the water save for these nicks in the edges of the great cup; yet it is possible enough to view her as a careless and reckless handmaiden busily devastating the cosmical china-closet. The "blow-out" is a tragedy, and the cause of further tragedy. The north winds, in the impetus gathered through a long, unimpeded flight over three hundred miles of water, ceaselessly try and test the sandy bulwarks for a slightest opening. The flaw once found, the work of devastation and desolation begins; and, once begun, it continues without cessation. Every hurricane cuts a wider and deeper gash, fills the air with clouds of loose sand, and gives sinister addition to the white shifting heaps and fields that steal slowly yet unrelentingly over the green hinterland of forest which lies below the southern slopes. Trees yet to die stand in passive bands at their feet; the stark, black trunks of trees long dead rise here and there in spots where the sand-glacier has done its work of ruin and passed on.

After some moments of scrambling and panting our two travelers gained the divide. Below them sloped a great amphitheatre of sand, falling in irregular gradations; and at the foot of all lay the lake, calmly azure, with its horizon, whether near or far for it was almost impossible to say--mystically vague. On either hand rose other hills of sand, set with sparse pines and covered, in patches, with growths of wild grape, the fruit half ripened. Within the amphitheatre, at various levels, rose grimly a few stumps and shreds of cedars long dead and long indifferent to the future ravages of the enemy. The whole scene was, to-day, plausibly gentle and inert. It was indeed a bridal of earth and sky, with the self-contained approval of the blue deep and no counter-assertion from any demon wind.

"So far, so good," said Randolph, taking off his hat, wiping his forehead, and breathing just a little harder than he liked. "The rest of our course is plain: down those slopes, and then a couple of miles along the shore. Easy walking, that; a mere promenade on a boulevard."

Cope stood on the height, and tossed his bare head like a tireless young colt. The sun fell bright on his mane of yellow hair. He took in a deep breath. "It's good!" he declared. "It's great! And the water looks better yet. Shall we make it in a rush?"

He began to plunge down the long, broken sand-slope. Each step was worth ten. Randolph followed--with judgment. He would not seem young enough to be a competitor, nor yet old enough to be a drag. On the shore he wiped and panted a little more--but not to the point of embarrassment, and still less to the point of mortification. After all, he was keeping up pretty well.

At the bottom Cope, with his shoes full of sand, turned round and looked up the slope down which his companion was coming. He waved his arms. "It's almost as fine from here!" he cried.