Bertram Copes Year | Page 3

rather cold and hard, blazed down,
in turn, on her.
"Why, what a nice, friendly fellow!" exclaimed Mrs. Phillips, on
receiving her refreshment. "Both kinds of sandwiches," she continued,
peering round her cup. "Were there three?" she asked with sudden
shrewdness.
"There were macaroons," he replied; "and there was some sort of
layer-cake. It was too sticky. These are more sensible."
"Never mind sense. If there is cake, I want it. Tell Amy to put it on a
plate."
"Amy?"

"Yes, Amy. My Amy."
"Your Amy?"
"Off with you,--parrot! And bring a fork too."
Cope lapsed back into his frown and recrossed the room. The girl
behind the samovar felt that her hair was unbecoming, after all, and that
her ring, borrowed for the occasion, was in bad taste. Cope turned back
with his plate of cake and his fork. Well, he had been promoted from a
"boy" to a "fellow"; but must he continue a kind of methodical dog-trot
through a sublimated butler's pantry?
"That's right," declared Mrs. Phillips, on his return, as she looked
lingeringly at his shapely thumb above the edge of the plate. "Come,
we will sit down together on this sofa, and you shall tell me all about
yourself." She looked admiringly at his blue serge knees as he settled
down into place. They were slightly bony, perhaps; "but then," as she
told herself, "he is still quite young. Who would want him anything but
slender?--even spare, if need be."
As they sat there together,--she plying him with questions and he,
restored to good humor, replying or parrying with an unembarrassed
exuberance,--a man who stood just within the curtained doorway and
flicked a small graying moustache with the point of his forefinger took
in the scene with a studious regard. Every small educational
community has its scholar manqué--its haunter of academic shades or
its intermittent dabbler in their charms; and Basil Randolph held that
role in Churchton. No alumnus himself, he viewed, year after year, the
passing procession of undergraduates who possessed in their young
present so much that he had left behind or had never had at all, and who
were walking, potentially, toward a promising future in which he could
take no share. Most of these had been commonplace young fellows
enough--noisy, philistine, glaringly cursory and inconsiderate toward
their elders; but a few of them--one now and then, at long intervals--he
would have enjoyed knowing, and knowing intimately. On these
infrequent occasions would come a union of frankness, comeliness and
élan, and the rudiments of good manners. But no one in all the

long-drawn procession had stopped to look at him a second time. And
now he was turning gray; he was tragically threatened with what might
in time become a paunch. His kind heart, his forthreaching nature, went
for naught; and the young men let him, walk under the elms and the
scrub-oaks neglected. If they had any interest beyond their egos, their
fraternities, and (conceivably) their studies, that interest dribbled away
on the quadrangle that housed the girl students. "If they only realized
how much a friendly hand, extended to them from middle life, might do
for their futures...!" he would sometimes sigh. But the youthful egoists,
ignoring him still, faced their respective futures, however uncertain,
with much more confidence than he, backed by whatever assurances
and accumulations he enjoyed, could face his own.
"To be young!" he said. "To be young!"
Do you figure Basil Randolph, alongside his portière, as but the
observer, the raisonneur, in this narrative? If so, you err. What!--you
may ask,--a rival, a competitor? That more nearly.
It was Medora Phillips herself who, within a moment or two, inducted
him into this role.
A gap had come in her chat with Cope. He had told her all he had been
asked to tell--or all he meant to tell: at any rate he had been given
abundant opportunity to expatiate upon a young man's darling
subject--himself. Either she now had enough fixed points for securing
the periphery of his circle or else she preferred to leave some portion of
his area (now ascertained approximately) within a poetic penumbra. Or
perhaps she wished some other middle-aged connoisseur to share her
admiration and confirm her judgment. At all events----
"Oh, Mr. Randolph," she cried, "come here."
Randolph left his doorway and stepped across.
"Now you are going to be rewarded," said the lady, broadly generous.
"You are going to meet Mr. Cope. You are going to meet Mr.----" She
paused. "Do you know,"--turning to the young man,--"I haven't your

first name?"
"Why, is that necessary?"
"You're not ashamed of it? Theodosius? Philander? Hieronymus?"
"Stop!--please. My name is Bertram."
"Never!"
"Bertram. Why not?"
"Because that would be too exactly right. I might have guessed and
guessed----!"
"Right or wrong, Bertram's my name."
"You