The Glory of the Conquered | Page 9

out to where Georgia was looking over the other evening papers.
"Say," he laughed, "you've got to do something for that fellow in
there--he's crazy as a loon. You've got him all stirred up, and if you
don't go in and get him calmed down he won't sleep a wink to-night,
and neither will I. He says Dr. Hubers is the greatest man in the world.
He says he won't except anybody--no, sir, not a living human soul! He's
been walking up and down the floor talking about it. Gee! you ought to
hear him. He says he came to this university on purpose to get some
work with Dr. Hubers, that his life will be ruined if he doesn't get it,
and that he's going to make all kinds of a ten-strike, if he does. And you
can't laugh at the fellow, for he's just dead down in earnest! He wanted
me to come out here and ask you some questions--I can't remember 'em
straight. How he worked--whether he was approachable. Oh, he fired
them at me thick. Say now, he would appreciate it, if you'd just go in

and give him a little talk about your cousin. Kind of serious talk, you
know. Why, he'd just hang on every word."
And Georgia, laughing--Georgia was strongly addicted to
laughing--said if there was any man ready to hang upon her every word,
that she, being twenty-seven and prospectless, must not let him get
away.
She told Beason many things--some of them facts and some of them
"higher truth," Georgia holding that things which ought to be true were
higher truth. She told him how Karl had tried to burn down his father's
house, when a very small boy, to see if something somebody had said
about fire was true, how he dissected a strange and wonderful bird
which came to the house on a visitor's hat, how he inspired a whole
crew of small boys to run away from home as explorers, how he
whipped a bigger boy most unmercifully for calling the Germans big
fools. Georgia arranged for her cousin what she called a thoroughly
consistent childhood. And then some less high truth about his working
his way through college, getting money enough to go abroad, his
absolute forgetfulness of everything when immersed in work--facts and
higher truth tallied here.
"Karl's queer," she said. "He's roasted a good deal by the academic
folks--pooh-hoos a lot of their stuff, you know. He seems to have a
strange notion that science, learning, the whole business is for
humanity. Unique conception, isn't it?"
After she went away, Beason said he had no doubt that when one came
to know Miss McCormick, he would see, in spite of her lightness of
manner, that she had many fine qualities.
"Qualities!" burst forth the enthusiastic Wyman. "Say--you just ought
to hear the newspaper fellows talk about Georgia McCormick! I tell
you she's a peach, and more than that, she's a brick. She's the
divide-her-last-penny kind--Georgia McCormick is. And I want you to
know that if ever any one had the joy of living stunt down pat, she's it.
It's an honest fact that if she was put in the penitentiary and you went to
see her after she'd been there awhile, she'd tell you so many funny and

interesting things about the pen. that you'd feel sore to think you
weren't in yourself. And _smart?_ And a hustler? Well, her paper's
done some fool things, but it's had sense to hold on to her all right-all
right."
And Beason replied that of course Dr. Hubers' cousin was bound to be
smart.

CHAPTER V
THE HOME-COMING
"Yes, suh, Chicago only two hours, suh," and the porter smiled broadly.
There was both memory and anticipation in that smile.
The car was almost empty. Across the aisle a man slept peacefully; a
little farther ahead a young lady read of the joys and sorrows of a
knight and his lady who had lived some several hundred years before,
and still farther on a lady all in black was looking from the window,
evidently lost to sorrows of more recent date. As no one was paying
any attention to the man and woman back there in the rear of the car it
was perfectly safe, when the porter passed on, for her hand to slip over
into his.
He responded with that quiet, protecting smile which always made it
seem no bad thing could ever come to her.
"Almost home, dear," he said, and then for a long time neither of them
spoke. Many big forces flowed freely into the silence of that moment.
She looked up at him at last with a smile which broke from her
seriousness as a ripple breaks from a wave.
"Suppose we had to