Pet Chickie-Brownie.
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
The X's, Flossie explained, indicated kisses--a dozen to an X.
The jury laughed Little Brownie out of court after pinning a
twenty-five-thousand-dollar verdict to his coat-tail. The nation elected
him the Pantaloon of the hour and pounded him with bladders and
slap-sticks.
Professor Litton had heard nothing of the preliminary fanfare of the
suit. As he read of it now he was too much puzzled to be amused. He
read with the same incredulity he had felt when he heard the janitor
quote Teed's remarks to his fiancee. Litton called his landlady's
attention to the remarkable case. She had been reading it, with greedy
glee, every morning. She had had such letters herself in her better
days. She felt sorry for poor Mr. Brown and sorrier for the poor
professor when he said:
"Poor Mr. Brown must have gone quite insane. Nobody could have built up
such wealth without brains; yet nobody with brains could have written
such letters. Ergo, he has lost his brains."
"You'll be late to prayers," was all the landlady said. She treated
Litton as if he were a half-witted son. And he obeyed her, forsook his
unfinished tea and hurried away to the chapel. Thence he went to his
class-room, where Teed achieved some further miracles of mistranslation.
Litton thought how curious it was that this young man, of whom his
scientific professor spoke so highly, should have fallen into the same
delirium of amorous idiocy as the famous plutocrat, Joel Brown.
When the class was dismissed he sank back in his chair by the class-room
window. It was wide ajar to-day for the first time since winter. April,
like an early-morning housemaid, was throwing open all the windows of
the world. Litton felt a delicious lassitude; he was bewildered with
leisure. A kind of sweet loneliness fell on him. He had made no
provision for times like these.
He sat back and twiddled his thumbs. His eyes roved lazily about the
campus. The wind that fluttered the sparse forelock on his overweening
forehead hummed in his ears. It had a distance in it. It brought soft
cadences of faint voices from the athletic field. They seemed to come
from no place nearer than the Athenian Academe.
Along the paths of the campus a few women were sauntering, for the
students and teachers in the Women's Annex had the privilege of the
libraries, the laboratories, and lecture-rooms.
Across Litton's field of view passed a figure that caught his eye.
Absently he followed it as it enlarged with approach. He realized that
it was Prof. Martha Binley, Ph.D., who taught Greek over there in the
Annex.
"How well she is looking!" he mused.
The very thought startled him, as if some one had spoken unexpectedly.
He wondered that he had noticed her appearance. After the window-sill
blotted her from view he still wondered, dallying comfortably with the
reverie.