The Glory of the Conquered | Page 7

quite different from germs. They
thought--unknowing assistants--that he was on a new trail, and judged
from the expression of his face that it was going to prove most
productive.

CHAPTER IV
FACTS AND "HIGHER TRUTH"
"Mr. Beason," said Georgia McCormick, looking across the dinner
table at the new student who had come to live with them--almost every
one who lived around the university had "students"--"if you had a dear
cousin who had married a dear friend, if said dear cousin and 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