"Up on the hill."
I veered off from the main street of the town ... a length of marching
telegraph poles and flat-roofed Western houses. I struck across lots in
the cold and dark. I floundered through half-hardened puddles of mud,
over vacant lots that afterward seemed to have been conjured up for my
impediment by some devil of piquaresque romance....
The hill, the very top of it, I had laboriously attained. On all sides
the college buildings gloomed in dusky whiteness of architecture.
One of them was lit inside with the mellow glow of electric lights. As I
stepped into the vestibule timidly, to enquire my way to Professor
Langworth's house (for it was his I decided to seek out first), a group
of fragrant, white-clad girls herded together in astonished tittering
when they saw me. And I surely looked the tramp, dusty and soiled from
my long ride.
I asked them the direction to Langworth's house, but they ignored me,
and scattered. Turning in confusion, I ran into a man-student bodily ...
excused myself ... the girls, standing further off, tittered again.
"Can you direct me to Professor Gustav Langworth's house?"
The student looked me over curiously. But he was of the right sort.
"Certainly. Come with me. I'm going that way. I'll show you where it
is...."
* * * * *
In silence we descended the hill....
"That house, in there a bit, under the trees ... that is where the
professor lives."
My knock set a dog barking inside ... the quick, insistent bark of a
collie that romped against me, putting up its paws on me when the door
was opened by a slim-bodied man of middle height. The man was dressed in
a grey suit ... he had a kindly, smooth-shaven face except for a
close-cropped pepper-and-salt moustache ... and grey-blue, quizzical,
but kindly eyes.
"Here, Laddie, come here!" called the voice of a frail, little woman
whose hair was white like wool, and like wool in texture. She sat
crumpled up by an open gas fire of imitation logs. She Was wry-backed,
her right shoulder thrust out into a discernible hunch.
She flung her arm tenderly about the dog, when it came to her. She was,
I figured, the professor's mother.... He held a hurried, whispered
consultation with her--after I had told him that studying his German
book at Mt. Hebron had impelled me to come to Laurel. Which story I
could see pleased and flattered him.