The Professor’s House

III

St. Peter awoke the next morning with the wish that he could be transported on his mattress from the new house to the old. But it was Sunday, and on that day his wife always breakfasted with him. There was no way out; they would meet at compt.

When he reached the dining-room Lillian was already at the table, behind the percolator. “Good morning, Godfrey. I hope you had a good night.” Her tone just faintly implied that he hadn’t deserved one.

“Excellent. And you?”

“I had a good conscience.” She smiled ruefully at him. “How can you let yourself be ungracious in your own house?”

“Oh, dear! And I went to sleep happy in the belief that I hadn’t said anything amiss the whole evening.”

“Nor anything aright, that I heard. Your disapproving silence can kill the life of any company.”

“It didn’t seem to, last night. You’re entirely wrong about Marsellus. He doesn’t notice.”

“He’s too polite to take notice, but he feels it. He’s very sensitive, under a well-schooled impersonal manner.”

St. Peter laughed. “Nonsense, Lillian! If he were, he couldn’t pick up a dinner party and walk off with it, as he almost always does. I don’t mind when it’s our dinner, but I hate seeing him do it in other people’s houses.”

“Be fair, Godfrey. You know that if you’d once begun to talk about your work in Spain, Louie would have followed it up with enthusiasm. Nobody is prouder of you than he.”

“That’s why I kept quiet. Support can be too able—certainly too fluent.”

“There you are; the dog in the manger! You won’t let him discuss your affairs, and you are annoyed when he talks about his own.”

“I admit I can’t bear it when he talks about Outland as his affair. (I mean Tom, of course, not their confounded place!) This calling it after him passes my comprehension. And Rosamond’s standing for it! It’s brazen impudence.”

Mrs. St. Peter frowned pensively. “I knew you wouldn’t like it, but they were so pleased about it, and their motives are so generous——”

“Hang it, Outland doesn’t need their generosity! They’ve got everything he ought to have had, and the least they can do is to be quiet about it, and not convert his very bones into a personal asset. It all comes down to this, my dear: one likes the florid style, or one doesn’t. You yourself used not to like it. And will you give me some more coffee, please?”

She refilled his cup and handed it across the table. “Nice hands,” he murmured, looking critically at them as he took it, “always such nice hands.”

“Thank you. I dislike floridity when it is beaten up to cover the lack of something, to take the place of something. I never disliked it when it came from exuberance. Then it isn’t floridness, it’s merely strong colour.”

“Very well; some people don’t care for strong colour. It fatigues them.” He folded his napkin. “Now I must be off to my desk.”

“Not quite yet. You never have time to talk to me. Just when did it begin, Godfrey, in the history of manners—that convention that if a man were pleased with his wife or his house or his success, he shouldn’t say so, frankly?” Mrs. St. Peter spoke thoughtfully, as if she had considered this matter before.

“Oh, it goes back a long way. I rather think it began in the Age of Chivalry—King Arthur’s knights. Whoever it was lived in that time, some feeling grew up that a man should do fine deeds and not speak of them, and that he shouldn’t speak the name of his lady, but sing of her as a Phyllis or a Nicolette. It’s a nice idea, reserve about one’s deepest feelings: keeps them fresh.”

“The Oriental peoples didn’t have an Age of Chivalry. They didn’t need one,” Lillian observed. “And this reserve—it becomes in itself ostentatious, a vain-glorious vanity.”

“Oh, my dear, all is vanity! I don’t dispute that. Now I must really go, and I wish I could play the game as well as you do. I have no enthusiasm for being a father-in-law. It’s you who keep the ball rolling. I fully appreciate that.”

“Perhaps,” mused his wife, as he rose, “it’s because you didn’t get the son-in-law you wanted. And yet he was highly coloured, too.”

The Professor made no reply to this. Lillian had been fiercely jealous of Tom Outland. As he left the house, he was reflecting that people who are intensely in love when they marry, and who go on being in love, always meet with something which suddenly or gradually makes a difference. Sometimes it is the children, or the grubbiness of being poor, sometimes a second infatuation. In their own case it had been, curiously enough, his pupil, Tom Outland.

St. Peter had met his wife in Paris, when he was but twenty-four, and studying for his doctorate. She too was studying there. French people thought her an English girl because of her gold hair and fair complexion. With her really radiant charm, she had a very interesting mind—but it was quite wrong to call it mind, the connotation was false. What she had was a richly endowed nature that responded strongly to life and art, and very vehement likes and dislikes which were often quite out of all proportion to the trivial object or person that aroused them. Before his marriage, and for years afterward, Lillian’s prejudices, her divinations about people and art (always instinctive and unexplained, but nearly always right), were the most interesting things in St. Peter’s life. When he accepted almost the first position offered him, in order to marry at once, and came to take the chair of European history at Hamilton, he was thrown upon his wife for mental companionship. Most of his colleagues were much older than he, but they were not his equals either in scholarship or in experience of the world. The only other man in the faculty who was carrying on important research work was Doctor Crane, the professor of physics. St. Peter saw a good deal of him, though outside his specialty he was uninteresting—a narrow-minded man, and painfully unattractive. Years ago Crane had begun to suffer from a malady which in time proved incurable, and which now sent him up for an operation periodically. St. Peter had had no friend in Hamilton of whom Lillian could possibly be jealous until Tom Outland came along, so well fitted by nature and early environment to help him with his work on the Spanish Adventurers.

When he had almost reached his old house and his study, the Professor remembered that he really must have an understanding with his landlord, or the place would be rented over his head. He turned and went down into another part of the city, by the car shops, where only workmen lived, and found his landlord’s little toy house, set on a hill-side, over a basement faced up with red brick and covered with hop vines. Old Appelhoff was sitting on a bench before his door, making a broom. Raising broom corn was one of his economies. Beside him was his dachshund bitch, Minna.

St. Peter explained that he wanted to stay on in the empty house, and would pay the full rent each month. So irregular a project annoyed Appelhoff. “I like fine to oblige you, Professor, but dey is several parties looking at de house already, an’ I don’t like to lose a year’s rent for maybe a few months.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Fred. I’ll take it for the year, to simplify matters. I want to finish my new book before I move.”

Fred still looked uneasy. “I better see de insurance man, eh? It says for purposes of domestic dwelling.”

“He won’t object. Let’s have a look at your garden. What a fine crop of apples and sickle pears you have!”

“I don’t like dem trees what don’t bear not’ing,” said the old man with sly humour, remembering the Professor’s glistening, barren shrubs and the good ground wasted behind his stucco wall.

“How about your linden-trees?”

“Oh, dem flowers is awful good for de headache!”

“You don’t look as if you were subject to it, Fred.”

“Not me, but my woman always had.”

“Pretty lonesome without her, Applehoff?”

“I miss her, Professor, but I ain’t just lonesome.” The old man rubbed his bristly chin. “My Minna here is most like a person, and den I got so many t’ings to t’ink about.”

“Have you? Pleasant things, I hope?”

“Well, all kinds. When I was young, in de old country, I had it hard to git my wife at all, an’ I never had time to t’ink. When I come to dis country I had to work so terrible hard on dat farm to make crops an’ pay debts, dat I was like a horse. Now I have it easy, an’ I take time to t’ink about all dem t’ings.”

St. Peter laughed. “We all come to it, Applehoff. That’s one thing I’m renting your house for, to have room to think. Good morning.”

Crossing the public park, on his way back to the old house, he espied his professional rival and enemy, Professor Horace Langtry, taking a Sunday morning stroll—very well got up in English clothes he had brought back from his customary summer in London, with a bowler hat of unusual block and a horn-handled walking-stick. In twenty years the two men had scarcely had speech with each other beyond a stiff “good morning.” When Langtry first came to the university he looked hardly more than a boy, with curly brown hair and such a fresh complexion that the students called him Lily Langtry. His round pink cheeks and round eyes and round chin made him look rather like a baby grown big. All these years had made little difference, except that his curls were now quite grey, his rosy cheeks even rosier, and his mouth dropped a little at the corners, so that he looked like a baby suddenly grown old and rather cross about it.

Seeing St. Peter, the younger man turned abruptly into a side alley, but the Professor overtook him.

“Good morning, Langtry. These elms are becoming real trees at last. They’ve changed a good deal since we first came here.”

Doctor Langtry moved his rosy chin sidewise over his high double collar. “Good morning, Doctor St. Peter. I really don’t remember much about the trees. They seem to be doing well now.”

St. Peter stepped abreast of him. “There have been many changes, Langtry, and not all of them are good. Don’t you notice a great difference in the student body as a whole, in the new crop that comes along every year now—how different they are from the ones of our early years here?”

The smooth chin turned again, and the other professor of European history blinked. “In just what respect?”

“Oh, in the all-embracing respect of quality! We have hosts of students, but they’re a common sort.”

“Perhaps. I can’t say I’ve noticed it.” The air between the two colleagues was not thawing out any. A church-bell rang. Langtry started hopefully. “You must excuse me, Doctor St. Peter, I am on my way to service.”

The Professor gave it up with a shrug. “All right, all right, Langtry, as you will. Quelle folie!”

Langtry half turned back, hesitated on the ball of his suddenly speeding foot, and said with faultless politeness: “I beg your pardon?”

St. Peter waved his hand with a gesture of negation, and detained the church-goer no longer. He sauntered along slackly through the hot September sunshine, wondering why Langtry didn’t see the absurdity of their long grudge. They had always been directly opposed in matters of university policy, until it had almost become a part of their professional duties to outwit and cramp each other.

When young Langtry first came there, his specialty was supposed to be American history. His uncle was president of the board of regents, and very influential in State politics; the institution had to look to him, indeed, to get its financial appropriations passed by the Legislature. Langtry was a Tory in his point of view, and was considered very English in his tone and manner. His lectures were dull, and the students didn’t like him. Every inducement was offered to make his courses popular. Liberal credits were given for collateral reading. A student could read almost anything that had ever been written in the United States and get credit for it in American history. He could charge up the time spent in perusing “The Scarlet Letter” to Colonial history, and “Tom Sawyer” to the Missouri Compromise, it was said. St. Peter openly criticized these lax methods, both to the faculty and to the regents. Naturally, “Madame Langtry” paid him out. During the Professor’s second Sabbatical year in Spain, Horace and his uncle together very nearly got his department away from him. They worked so quietly that it was only at the eleventh hour that St. Peter’s old students throughout the State got wind of what was going on, dropped their various businesses and professions for a few days, and came up to the capital in dozens and saved his place for him. The opposition had been so formidable that when it came time for his third year away, the Professor had not dared ask for it, but had taken an extension of his summer vacation instead. The fact that he was carrying on another line of work than his lectures, and was publishing books that weren’t strictly text-books, had been used against him by Langtry’s uncle.

As Langtry felt that the unpopularity of his course was due to his subject, a new chair was created for him. There couldn’t be two heads in European history, so the board of regents made for him a chair of Renaissance history, or, as St. Peter said, a Renaissance chair of history. Of late years, for reasons that had not much to do with his lectures, Langtry had prospered better. To the new generations of country and village boys now pouring into the university in such large numbers, Langtry had become, in a curious way, an instructor in manners,—what is called an “influence.” To the football-playing farmer boy who had a good allowance but didn’t know how to dress or what to say, Langtry looked like a short cut. He had several times taken parties of undergraduates to London for the summer, and they had come back wonderfully brushed up. He introduced a very popular fraternity into the university, and its members looked after his interests, as did its affiliated sorority. His standing on the faculty was now quite as good as St. Peter’s own, and the Professor wondered what Langtry still had to be sore about.

What was the use of keeping up the feud? They had both come there young men, fighting for their places and their lives; now they were not very young any more; they would neither of them, probably, ever hold a better position. Couldn’t Langtry see it was a draw, that they had both been beaten?

IV

ON Monday afternoon St. Peter mounted to his study and lay down on the box-couch, tired out with his day at the university. The first few weeks of the year were very fatiguing for him; there were so many exhausting things besides his lectures and all the new students; long faculty meetings in which almost no one was ever frank, and always the old fight to keep up the standard of scholarship, to prevent the younger professors, who had a sharp eye to their own interests, from farming the whole institution out to athletics, and to the agricultural and commercial schools favoured and fostered by the State Legislature.

The September heat, too, was hard on him. He wanted to be out at the lake every day—it was never so fine as in late September. He was lying with closed eyes, resting his mind on the picture of intense autumn-blue water, when he heard a tap at the door and his daughter Rosamond entered, very handsome in a silk suit of a vivid shade of lilac, admirably suited to her complexion and showing that in the colour of her cheeks there was actually a tone of warm lavender. In that low room she seemed very tall indeed, a little out of drawing, as, to her father’s eye, she so often did. Usually, however, people were aware only of her rich complexion, her curving, unresisting mouth and mysterious eyes. Tom Outland had seen nothing else, and he was a young man who saw a great deal.

“Am I interrupting something important, Papa?”

“No, not at all, my dear. Sit down.”

On his writing-table she caught a glimpse of pages in a handwriting not his—a script she knew very well.

“Not much choice of chairs, is there?” she smiled. “Papa, I don’t like to have you working in a place like this. It’s not fitting.”

“Much easier than to break in a new room, Rosie. A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it’s better than a new one.”

“That’s really what I came to see you about.” Rosamond traced the edge of a hole in the matting with the tip of her lilac sunshade. “Won’t you let me build you a little study in the back yard of the new house? I have such good ideas for it, and you would have no bother about it at all.”

“Oh, thank you, Rosamond. It’s most awfully nice of you to think of it. But keep it just an idea—it’s better so. Lots of things are. For the present I’ll plod on here. It’s absurd, but it suits me. Habit is such a big part of work.”

“With Augusta’s old things lying about, and those dusty old forms? Why didn’t she at least get those out of your way?”

“Oh, they have a right here, by long tenure. It’s their room, too. I don’t want to come upon them lying in some dump-heap on the road to the lake. They remind me of the times when you were little girls, and your first party frocks used to hang on them at night, when I worked.”

Rosamond smiled, unconvinced. “Papa, don’t joke with me. I’ve come to talk about something serious, and it’s very difficult. You know I’m a little afraid of you.” She dropped her shadowy, bewitching eyes.

“Afraid of me? Never!”

“Oh, yes, I am when you’re sarcastic. You musn’t be to-day, please. Louie and I have often talked this over. We feel strongly about it. He’s often been on the point of blurting out with it, but I’ve curbed him. You don’t always approve of Louie and me. Of course it was only Louie’s energy and technical knowledge that ever made Tom’s discovery succeed commercially, but we don’t feel that we ought to have all the returns from it. We think you ought to let us settle an income on you, so that you could give up your university work and devote all your time to writing and research. That is what Tom would have wanted.”

St. Peter rose quickly, with the light, supple spring he had when he was very nervous, crossed to the window, wide on its hook, and half closed it. “My dear daughter,” he said decisively, when he had turned round to her, “I couldn’t possibly take any of Outland’s money.”

“But why not? You were the best friend he had in the world, he owed more to you than to anyone else, and he hated having you hampered by teaching. He admired your mind, and nothing would have pleased him more than helping you to do the work you do better than anyone else. If he were alive, that would be one of the first things he would use this money for.”

“But he is not alive, and there was no word about me in his will, and so there is nothing to build your pretty theory upon. It’s wonderfully nice of you and Louie, and I’m very pleased, you know.”

“But Tom was so impractical, Father. He never thought it would mean more than a liberal dress allowance for me, if he thought at all. I don’t know—he never spoke to me about it.”

St. Peter smiled quizzically. “I’m not so sure about his impracticalness. When he was working on that gas, he once remarked to me that there might be a fortune in it. To be sure, he didn’t wait to find out whether there was a fortune, but that had to do with quite another side of him. Yes, I think he knew his idea would make money and he wanted you to have it, with him or without him.”

The young woman’s face grew troubled. “Even if I married?”

“He wanted you to have whatever would make you happy.”

She sighed luxuriously. “Louie has done that. The only thing that troubles me is, I feel you ought to have some of this money, that he would wish it. He was so full of gratitude, felt that he owed you so much.”

Her father again rose, with that guarded, nervous movement. “Once and for all, Rosamond, understand that he owed me no more than I owed him. Nothing hurts me so much as to have any member of my family talk as if we had done something fine for that young man, brought him out, produced him. In a lifetime of teaching, I’ve encountered just one remarkable mind; but for that, I’d consider my good years largely wasted. And there can be no question of money between me and Tom Outland. I can’t explain just how I feel about it, but it would somehow damage my recollections of him, would make that episode in my life commonplace like everything else. And that would be a great loss to me. I’m purely selfish in refusing your offer; my friendship with Outland is the one thing I will not have translated into the vulgar tongue.”

His daughter looked perplexed and a little resentful.

“Sometimes,” she murmured, “I think you feel I oughtn’t to have taken it, either.”

“You had no choice. For you it was settled by his own hand. Your bond with him was social, and it follows the laws of society, and they are based on property. Mine wasn’t, and there was no material clause in it. He empowered you to carry out all his wishes, and I realize that you have responsibilities—but none toward me. There is Rodney Blake, of course, if he should ever turn up. You keep up some search for him?”

“Louie attends to it. He has investigated and rejected several impostors.”

“Then, of course, there are other friends of Tom’s. The Cranes, for instance?”

Rosamond’s face grew hard. “I won’t bother you about the Cranes, Papa. We will attend to them. Mrs. Crane is a common creature, and she is advised by that dreadful shyster brother of hers, Homer Bright. You know what he is.”

“Oh, yes! He was about the greatest bluffer I ever had in my classes.”

Rosamond had risen to go. “I want you to be awfully happy, daughter,” St. Peter went on, “and Tom did. It’s only young people like you and Louie who can get any fun out of money. And there is enough to cover the fine, the almost imaginary obligations. You won’t be sorry if you are generous with people like the Cranes.”

“Thank you, Papa. I shan’t forget.” Rosamond went down the narrow stairway, leaving behind her a faint, fresh odour of lavender and orrisroot, and her father lay down again on the box-couch. “A hint about the Cranes will be enough,” he was thinking.

He didn’t in the least understand his older daughter. Not that he pretended to understand Kathleen, either; but he usually knew how she would feel about things, and she had always seemed to need his protection more than Rosamond. When she was a student at the university, he used sometimes to see her crossing the campus alone, her head and shoulders lowered against the wind, her muff beside her face, her narrow skirt clinging close. There was something too plucky, too “I can-go-it-alone,” about her quick step and jaunty little head; he didn’t like it, it gave him a sudden pang. He would always call to her and catch up with her, and make her take his arm and be docile.

She had been much quicker at her lessons than Rosie, and very clever at water-colour portrait sketches. She had done several really good likenesses of her father—one, at least, was the man himself. With her mother she had no luck. She tried again and again, but the face was always hard, the upper lip longer than it seemed in life, the nose long and severe, and she made something cold and plaster-like of Lillian’s beautiful complexion. “No, I don’t see Mamma like that,” she used to say, throwing out her chin. “Of course I don’t! It just comes like that.” She had done many heads of her sister, all very sentimental and curiously false, though Louie Marsellus protested to like them. Her drawing-teacher at the university had urged Kathleen to go to Chicago and study in the life classes at the Art Institute, but she said resolutely: “No, I can’t really do anybody but Papa, and I can’t make a living painting him.”

“The only unusual thing about Kitty,” her father used to tell his friends, “is that she doesn’t think herself a bit unusual. Nowadays the girls in my classes who have a spark of aptitude for anything seem to think themselves remarkable.”

Though wilfulness was implied in the line of her figure, in the way she sometimes threw out her chin, Kathleen had never been deaf to reasoning, deaf to her father, but once; and that was when, shortly after Rosamond’s engagement to Tom, she announced that she was going to marry Scott McGregor. Scott was young, was just getting a start as a journalist, and his salary was not large enough for two people to live upon. That fact, the St. Peters thought, would act as a brake upon the impetuous young couple. But soon after they were engaged Scott began to do his daily prose poem for a newspaper syndicate. It was a success from the start, and increased his earnings enough to enable him to marry. The Professor had expected a better match for Kitty. He was no snob, and he liked Scott and trusted him; but he knew that Scott had a usual sort of mind, and Kitty had flashes of something quite different. Her father thought a more interesting man would make her happier. There was no holding her back, however, and the curious part of it was that, after the very first, her mother supported her. St. Peter had a vague suspicion that this was somehow on Rosamond’s account more than on Kathleen’s; Lillian always worked things out for Rosamond. Yet at the time he couldn’t see how Kathleen’s marriage would benefit Rosie. “Rosie is like your second self,” he once declared to his wife, “but you never pampered yourself at her age as you do her.”

V

IT was an intense September noon—warm, windy, golden, with the smell of ripe grapes and drying vines in the air, and the lake rolling blue on the horizon. Scott McGregor, going into the west corner of the university campus, caught sight of Mrs. St. Peter, just ahead of him, walking in the same direction. He ran and caught up with her.

“Hello, Lillian! Going in to see the Professor? So am I. I want him to go swimming with me—I’m cutting work. Shall we drop in and hear the end of his lecture, or sit down here on a bench in the sun?”

“We can go quietly to the door and listen. If it’s not interesting, we can come back and sit down for a chat.”

“Good! I came early to overhear a bit. This is the hour he’s with his seniors, isn’t it?”

They entered and went along the hall until they came to number 17; the door was ajar, and at the moment one of the students was speaking. When he finished, they heard the Professor reply to him.

“No, Miller, I don’t myself think much of science as a phase of human development. It has given us a lot of ingenious toys; they take our attention away from the real problems, of course, and since the problems are insoluble, I suppose we ought to be grateful for distraction. But the fact is, the human mind, the individual mind, has always been made more interesting by dwelling on the old riddles, even if it makes nothing of them. Science hasn’t given us any new amazements, except of the superficial kind we get from witnessing dexterity and sleight-of-hand. It hasn’t given us any richer pleasures, as the Renaissance did, nor any new sins—not one! Indeed, it takes our old ones away. It’s the laboratory, not the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. You’ll agree there is not much thrill about a physiological sin. We were better off when even the prosaic matter of taking nourishment could have the magnificence of a sin. I don’t think you help people by making their conduct of no importance—you impoverish them. As long as every man and woman who crowded into the cathedrals on Easter Sunday was a principal in a gorgeous drama with God, glittering angels on one side and the shadows of evil coming and going on the other, life was a rich thing. The king and the beggar had the same chance at miracles and great temptations and revelations. And that’s what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own little individual lives. It makes us happy to surround our creature needs and bodily instincts with as much pomp and circumstance as possible. Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.

“Moses learned the importance of that in the Egyptian court, and when he wanted to make a population of slaves into an independent people in the shortest possible time, he invented elaborate ceremonials to give them a feeling of dignity and purpose. Every act had some imaginative end. The cutting of the finger nails was a religious observance. The Christian theologians went over the books of the Law, like great artists, getting splendid effects by excision. They reset the stage with more space and mystery, throwing all the light upon a few sins of great dramatic value—only seven, you remember, and of those only three that are perpetually enthralling. With the theologians came the cathedral-builders; the sculptors and glassworkers and painters. They might, without sacrilege, have changed the prayer a little and said, Thy will be done in art, as it is in heaven. How can it be done anywhere else as it is in heaven? But I think the hour is up. You might tell me next week, Miller, what you think science has done for us, besides making us very comfortable.”

As the young men filed out of the room, Mrs. St. Peter and McGregor went in.

“I came over to get you to go to the electrician’s with me, Godfrey, but I won’t make you. Scott wants you to run out to the lake, and it’s such a fine day, you really should go.”

“Car’s outside. We’ll just drop Lillian at the house, Doctor, and you can pick up your bathing-suit. We heard part of your lecture, by the way. How you get by the Methodists is still a mystery to me.

“I wish he would get into trouble, Scott,” said Lillian as they left the building. “I wish he wouldn’t talk to those fat-faced boys as if they were intelligent beings. You cheapen yourself, Godfrey. It makes me a little ashamed.”

“I was rather rambling on to-day. I’m sorry you happened along. There’s a fellow in that lot, Tod Miller, who isn’t slow, and he excites me to controversy.”

“All the same,” murmured his wife, “it’s hardly dignified to think aloud in such company. It’s in rather bad taste.”

“Thank you for the tip, Lillian. I won’t do it again.”

It took Scott only twenty minutes to get out to the lake. He drew up at the bit of beach St. Peter had bought for himself years before; a little triangle of sand running out into the water, with a bath-house and seven shaggy pine-trees on it. Scott had to fuss with the car, and the Professor was undressed and in the water before him.

When McGregor was ready to go in, his father-in-law was some distance out, swimming with an over-arm stroke, his head and shoulders well out of the water. He wore on his head a rubber visor of a kind he always brought home from France in great numbers. This one was vermilion, and was like a continuation of his flesh—his arms and back were burned a deep terra-cotta from a summer in the lake. His head and powerful reaching arms made a strong red pattern against the purple blue of the water. The visor was picturesque—his head looked sheathed and small and intensely alive, like the heads of the warriors on the Parthenon frieze in their tight, archaic helmets.

By five o’clock St. Peter and McGregor were dressed and lying on the sand, their overcoats wrapped about them, smoking. Suddenly Scott began to chuckle.

“Oh, Professor, you know your English friend, Sir Edgar Spilling? The day after I met him at your house, he came up to my office at the Herald to get some facts you’d been too modest to give him. When he was leaving he stood and looked at one of these motto cards I have over my desk, DON’T KNOCK, and said: ‘May I ask why you don’t have that notice on the outside of your door? I didn’t observe any other way of getting in.’ They never get wise, do they? He really went out to see Marsellus’ place—seemed interested. Doctor, are you going to let them call that place after Tom?”

“My dear boy, how can I prevent it?”

“Well, you surely don’t like the idea, do you?”

The Professor lit another cigarette and was a long while about it. When he had got it going, he turned on his elbow and looked at McGregor. “Scott, you must see that I can’t make suggestions to Louie. He’s perfectly consistent. He’s a great deal more generous and public-spirited than I am, and my preferences would be enigmatical to him. I can’t, either, very gracefully express myself to you about his affairs.”

“I get you. Sorry he riles me so. I always say it shan’t occur the next time, but it does.” Scott took out his pipe and lay silent for a time, looking at the gold glow burning on the water and on the wings of the gulls as they flew by. His expression was wistful, rather mournful. He was a good-looking fellow, with sunburned blond hair, splendid teeth, attractive eyes that usually frowned a little unless he was laughing outright, a small, prettily cut mouth, restless at the corners. There was something moody and discontented about his face. The Professor had a great deal of sympathy for him; Scott was too good for his work. He had been delighted when his daily poem and his “uplift” editorials first proved successful, because that enabled him to marry. Now he could sell as many good-cheer articles as he had time to write, on any subject, and he loathed doing them. Scott had early picked himself out to do something very fine, and he felt that he was wasting his life and his talents. The new group of poets made him angry. When a new novel was discussed seriously by his friends, he was perfectly miserable. St. Peter knew that the poor boy had seasons of desperate unhappiness. His disappointed vanity ate away at his vitals like the Spartan boy’s wolf, and only the deep lines in his young forehead and the twitching at the corners of his mouth showed that he suffered.

Not long ago, when the students were giving an historical pageant to commemorate the deeds of an early French explorer among the Great Lakes, they asked St. Peter to do a picture for them, and he had arranged one which amused him very much, though it had nothing to do with the subject. He posed his two sons-in-law in a tapestry-hung tent, for a conference between Richard Plantagenet and the Saladin, before the walls of Jerusalem. Marsellus, in a green dressing-gown and turban, was seated at a table with a chart, his hands extended in reasonable, patient argument. The Plantagenet was standing, his plumed helmet in his hand, his square yellow head haughtily erect, his unthoughtful brows fiercely frowning, his lips curled and his fresh face full of arrogance. The tableau had received no special notice, and Mrs. St. Peter had said dryly that she was afraid nobody saw his little joke. But the Professor liked his picture, and he thought it quite fair to both the young men.

VI

THE Professor happened to come home earlier than usual one bright October afternoon. He left the walk and cut across the turf, intending to enter by the open French window, but he paused a moment outside to admire the scene within. The drawing-room was full of autumn flowers, dahlias and wild asters and goldenrod. The red-gold sunlight lay in bright puddles on the thick blue carpet, made hazy aureoles about the stuffed blue chairs. There was, in the room, as he looked through the window, a rich, intense effect of autumn, something that presented October much more sharply and sweetly to him than the coloured maples and the aster-bordered paths by which he had come home. It struck him that the seasons sometimes gain by being brought into the house, just as they gain by being brought into painting, and into poetry. The hand, fastidious and bold, which selected and placed—it was that which made the difference. In Nature there is no selection.

In a corner, beside the steaming brass tea-kettle, sat Lillian and Louie, a little lacquer table between them, bending, it seemed, over a casket of jewels. Lillian held up lovingly in her fingers a green-gold necklace, evidently an old one, without stones. “Of course emeralds would be beautiful, Louie, but they seem a little out of scale—to belong to a different scheme of life than any you and Rosamond can live here. You aren’t, after all, outrageously rich. When would she wear them?”

“At home, Dearest, with me, at our own dinner-table at Outland! I like the idea of their being out of scale. I’ve never given her any jewels. I’ve waited all this time to give her these. To me, her name spells emeralds.”

Mrs. St. Peter smiled, easily persuaded. “You’ll never be able to keep them. You’ll show them to her.”

“Oh, no, I won’t! They are to stay at the jeweller’s, in Chicago, until we all go down for the birthday party. That’s another secret we have to keep. We have such lots of them!” He bent over her hand and kissed it with warmth.

St. Peter swung in over the window rail. “That is always the cue for the husband to enter, isn’t it? What’s this about Chicago, Louie?”

He sat down, and Marsellus brought him some tea, lingering beside his chair. “It must be a secret from Rosie, but you see it happens that the date of your lecture engagement at the University of Chicago is coincident with her birthday, so I have planned that we shall all go down together. And among other diversions, we shall attend your lectures.”

The Professor’s eyebrows rose. “Bus-man’s holiday for the ladies, I should say.”

“But not for me. Remember, I wasn’t in your classes, like Scott and Outland. I’d give a good deal if I’d had the chance!” Louie said somewhat plaintively. “So you must make it up to me.”

“Come if you wish. Lectures seem to me a rather grim treat, Louie.”

“Not to me. With a wink of encouragement I’ll go on to Boston with you next winter, when you give the Lowell lectures.”

“Would you, really? Next year’s a long way off. Now I must get clean. I’ve been working in my other-house garden, and I’m scarcely fit to have tea with a beautiful lady and a smartly dressed gentleman. What am I to do about that garden in the end, Lillian? Destroy it? Or leave it to the mercy of the next tenants?”

As he went upstairs he turned at the bend of the staircase and looked back at them, again bending over their little box. Mrs. St. Peter was wearing the white silk crêpe that had been the most successful of her summer dresses, and an orchid velvet ribbon about her shining hair. She wouldn’t have made herself look quite so well if Louie hadn’t been coming, he reflected. Or was it that he wouldn’t have noticed it if Louie hadn’t been there? A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.

Lillian’s coquetry with her sons-in-law amused him. He hadn’t foreseen it, and he found it rather the most piquant and interesting thing about having married daughters. It had begun with Scott—the younger sister was married before the elder. St. Peter had thought that Scott McGregor was the sort of fellow Lillian always found tiresome. But no; within a few weeks after Kathleen’s marriage, arch and confidential relations began to be evident between them. Even now, when Louie was so much in the foreground, and Scott was touchy and jealous, Lillian was very tactful and patient with him.

With Louie, Lillian seemed to be launching into a new career, and Godfrey began to think that he understood his own wife very little. He would have said that she would feel about Louie just as he did; would have cultivated him as a stranger in the town, because he was so unusual and exotic, but without in the least wishing to adopt anyone so foreign into the family circle. She had always been fastidious to an unreasonable degree about small niceties of deportment. She could never forgive poor Tom Outland for the angle at which he sometimes held a cigar in his mouth, or for the fact that he never learned to eat salad with ease. At the dinner-table, if Tom, forgetting himself in talk, sometimes dropped back into railroad lunch-counter ways and pushed his plate away from him when he had finished a course, Lillian’s face would become positively cruel in its contempt. Irregularities of that sort put her all on edge. But Louie could hurry audibly through his soup, or kiss her resoundingly on the cheek at a faculty reception, and she seemed to like it.

Yes, with her sons-in-law she had begun the game of being a woman all over again. She dressed for them, planned for them, schemed in their interests. She had begun to entertain more than for years past—the new house made a plausible pretext—and to use her influence and charm in the little anxious social world of Hamilton. She was intensely interested in the success and happiness of these two young men, lived in their careers as she had once done in his. It was splendid, St. Peter told himself. She wasn’t going to have to face a stretch of boredom between being a young woman and being a young grandmother. She was less intelligent and more sensible than he had thought her.

When Godfrey came downstairs ready for dinner, Louie was gone. He walked up to the chair where his wife was reading, and took her hand.

“My dear,” he said quite delicately, “I wish you could keep Louie from letting his name go up for the Arts and Letters. It’s not safe yet. He’s not been here long enough. They’re a fussy little bunch, and he ought to wait until they know him better.”

“You mean someone will blackball him? Do you really think so? But the Country Club——”

“Yes, Lillian; the Country Club is a big affair, and needs money. The Arts and Letters is a little group of fellows, and, as I said, fussy.”

“Scott belongs,” said Mrs. St. Peter rebelliously. “Did he tell you?”

“No, he didn’t, and I shall not tell you who did. But if you’re tactful, you can save Louie’s feelings.”

Mrs. St. Peter closed her book without glancing down at it. A new interest shone in her eyes and made them look quite through and beyond her husband. “I must see what I can do with Scott,” she murmured.

St. Peter turned away to hide a smile. An old student of his, a friend who belonged to “the Outland period,” had told him laughingly that he was sure Scott would blackball Marsellus if his name ever came to the vote. “You know Scott is a kid in some things,” the friend had said. “He’s a little sore at Marsellus, and says a secret ballot is the only way he can ever get him where it wouldn’t hurt Mrs. St. Peter.”

While the Professor was eating his soup, he studied his wife’s face in the candlelight. It had changed so much since he found her laughing with Louie, and especially since he had dropped the hint about the Arts and Letters. It had become, he thought, too hard for the orchid velvet in her hair. Her upper lip had grown longer, and stiffened as it always did when she encountered opposition.

“Well,” he reflected, “it will be interesting to see what she can do with Scott. That will make rather a test case.”