Bertram Copes Year | Page 2

than "writing"--except
lecturing about it.
"Why haven't we known you before?" Medora T. Phillips asked him at
a small reception. Mrs. Phillips spoke out loudly and boldly, and held
his hand as long as she liked. No, not as long as she liked, but longer
than most women would have felt at liberty to do. And besides
speaking loudly and boldly, she looked loudly and boldly; and she
employed a determined smile which seemed to say, "I'm old enough to
do as I please." Her brusque informality was expected to carry itself
off--and much else besides. "Of course I simply can't be half so
intrepid as I seem!" it said. "Everybody about us understands that, and I
must ask your recognition too for an ascertained fact."
"Known me?" returned Cope, promptly enough. "Why, you haven't
known me because I haven't been here to be known." He spoke in a
ringing, resonant voice, returning her unabashed pressure with a hearty
good will and blazing down upon her through his clear blue eyes with a
high degree of self-possession, even of insouciance. And he explained,
with a liberal exhibition of perfect teeth, that for the two years
following his graduation he had been teaching literature at a small
college in Wisconsin and that he had lately come back to Alma Mater
for another bout: "I'm after that degree," he concluded.

"Haven't been here?" she returned. "But you have been here; you must
have been here for years--for four, anyhow. So why haven't we...?" she
began again.
"Here as an undergraduate, yes," he acknowledged. "Unregarded dust.
Dirt beneath your feet. In rainy weather, mud."
"Mud!" echoed Medora Phillips loudly, with an increased pressure on
his long, narrow hand. "Why, Babylon was built of mud--of mud bricks,
anyway. And the Hanging Gardens...!" She still clung, looking up his
slopes terrace by terrace.
Cope kept his self-possession and smiled brilliantly.
"Gracious!" he said, no less resonant than before. "Am I a landscape
garden? Am I a stage-setting? Am I a----?"
Medora Phillips finally dropped his hand. "You're a wicked,
unappreciative boy," she declared. "I don't know whether to ask you to
my house or not. But you may make yourself useful in this house, at
least. Run along over to that corner and see if you can't get me a cup of
tea."
Cope bowed and smiled and stepped toward the tea-table. His head
once turned, the smile took on a wry twist. He was no squire of dames,
no frequenter of afternoon receptions. Why the deuce had he come to
this one? Why had he yielded so readily to the urgings of the professor
of mathematics?--himself urged in turn, perhaps, by a wife for whose
little affair one extra man at the opening of the fall season counted, and
counted hugely. Why must he now expose himself to the boundless
aplomb and momentum of this woman of forty-odd who was finding
amusement in treating him as a "college boy"? "Boy" indeed she had
actually called him: well, perhaps his present position made all this
possible. He was not yet out in the world on his own. In the background
of "down state" was a father with a purse in his pocket and a hand to
open the purse. Though the purse was small and the hand reluctant, he
must partly depend on both for another year. If he were only in
business--if he were only a broker or even a salesman--he should not

find himself treated with such blunt informality and condescension as a
youth. If, within the University itself, he were but a real member of the
faculty, with an assured position and an assured salary, he should not
have to lie open to the unceremonious hectorings of the socially
confident, the "placed."
He regained his smile on the way across the room, and the young
creature behind the samovar, who had had a moment's fear that she
must deal with Severity, found that a beaming Affability--though
personally unticketed in her memory--was, after all, her happier
allotment. In her reaction she took it all as a personal compliment. She
could not know, of course, that it was but a piece of calculated
expressiveness, fitted to a 'particular social function and doubly
overdone as the wearer's own reaction from the sprouting indignation
of the moment before. She hoped that her hair, under his sweeping
advance, was blowing across her forehead as lightly and carelessly as it
ought to, and that his taste in marquise rings might be substantially the
same as hers. She faced the Quite Unknown, and asked it sweetly, "One
lump or two?"
"The dickens! How do I know?" he thought. "An extra one on the
saucer, please," he said aloud, with his natural resonance but slightly
hushed. And his blue eyes, clear and