The Glory of the Conquered | Page 7

dear friend had gone skipping away to Europe, and for one year and a half had flitted gayly from country to country, looking into each other's eyes and murmuring sweet nothings all the while that you had been earning your daily bread by telling daily untruths for a daily paper, if at the end of said period said cousin and friend, forced by a steadily diminishing bank account to return to the stern necessities of life, had written you a nonchalant little note telling you to 'look up a place for them to lay their heads'--which being translated in terms of action meant that you were to walk the streets looking for vacant houses when vacant houses there were none--if this combination of circumstances befell you, Mr. Beason--just what would you do?"
Beason pondered the matter carefully. Mr. Beason applied the scientific method to everything in life, and was not one to commit himself rashly. "I think," he announced, weightily, "that I would tell them to go to a hotel and stay there until they could look up their own house."
"But Mr. Beason," she rambled on, eyes twinkling--Georgia had decided this young man needed "waking up"--"suppose you loved them both very dearly--suppose they were positively the dearest people who ever walked the earth--and that breaking your neck for them was the greatest pleasure life could confer upon you--what would you do _then?_"
"I'm sure I don't know," said Beason, bluntly; "I never loved any one that dearly."
"'Tis better to love and break one's neck,"--began Harry Wyman, who aspired to the position of class poet.
"If you had ever known Ernestine and Karl,"--a tenderness creeping into Georgia's voice--"you'd be almost willing to hunt houses for them. Almost, I say--for I doubt if any affection on earth should be put to the house-hunting test. Even my cousin Dr. Karl Hubers------"
"Your--_cousin?_"--Beason broke in. "_Your--?_"--in telling the story Georgia always spoke of the unflattering emphasis on the final your. But at the time she could think of nothing save the transformed face of John Beason. The instantaneousness with which he had waked up was fairly gruesome. He was looking straight at Georgia; all three were held by his manner.
"Now my dear Mr. Beason," she laughed finally, "don't be so hard on us. My mother and Dr. Hubers' mother were sisters, but please don't rub it in so unmercifully that poor mother has been altogether distanced in the matter of offspring. You see mother married an Irish politician--hence me. While Aunt Katherine--Karl's mother--married a German scholar--therefore Karl. And the German scholar was the son of a German professor. In fact, from all I have been led to believe the Hubers were busily engaged in the professoring business at the time Julius Caesar stalked up from Italy."
"Now Georgia," hastened Mrs. McCormick earnestly, "this newspaper work gives you such a tendency to exaggerate. I never heard it said before that the family went that far back."
"Perhaps not. But just because a thing has never been said before, isn't there all the more reason for saying it now? And I'm just trying to make Mr. Beason understand"--demurely--"why some people are scholars and others are not."
But Season's mind was working straight from the shoulder.
"Does he ever come here?" he demanded.
"Yes, indeed; he honours our poor board quite often with the light of his countenance."
Beason accepted that as unextravagant statement of fact.
"Well, do you--know about him?" he asked, bluntly.
"That he's 'way up? Oh, my, yes. And we're tremendously proud of him."
"I should think you would be," said Beason, rather grimly.
"Karl is indeed remarkable," said Mrs. McCormick, blandly expansive, well pleased with both Karl and her own appreciation of him. "I feel that our family has much to be proud of, to think both he and Georgia have done so well with their work."
The expression of Beason's face was a study. Georgia laughed over it for weeks afterwards.
"Now my chief interest," said Wyman, who was at the stage where he put life in capital letters, and cherished harmless ideas about his own deep understanding of the human heart, "is in Mrs. Hubers. There, I fancy,"--it was his capital letter voice--"is a woman who understands."
"A dandy girl," said Georgia, briskly.
"She has the artistic temperament?" he pursued.
"Oh, not disagreeably so," she retorted.
"You see," turning to Beason, who was plainly impatient at this shifting to anything so irrelevant as a wife, "I play quite a leading part in Dr. Hubers' life. I'm his cousin--that's the accident of birth; but I handed over to him his wife, for which he owes me undying gratitude. I'm looking for something really splendid from Europe."
"I wish I hadn't gone home so early that spring," sighed Wyman. "I'd like to have seen that little affair. It must have been the real thing in romance."
"But it was nothing of the sort! It was