This threw her into a spasm of fear. "Oh, not yet! Not yet! I'm afraid
to let the students all know it. A little later--on Commencement Day
will be time enough."
He bowed to her decision--not for the last time.
For a time Litton had taken pleasure in employing his learning in the
service of Martha's beauty. He called her classic names--_Meae Deliciae_,
or _Glukutate_, or _Melema_. A poem that he had always thought the last
word in silliness became a modest expression of his own emotions--the
poem in which Catallus begs Lesbia, "Give me a thousand kisses, then a
hundred, then a thousand more, then a second hundred; then, when we have
made up thousands galore, we shall mix them up so that we shall not
know--nor any enemy be able to cast a spell because he knows--how many
kisses there are."
His scholarship began to weary her, however, and it began to seem an
affectation to him; so that he was soon mangling the English language in
speech and in the frequent notes he found it necessary to send his idol
on infinitely unimportant matters that could not wait from after lunch
to after dinner.
She coined phrases for him, too, and his heart rejoiced when she
achieved the epoch-making revision of Stuart into Stookie-tookie! He had
thought that Toodie was wonderful, but it was a mere stepping-stone to
Stookie-tookie.
Her babble ran through his head like music, and it softened his heart,
so that almost nothing could bring him to earth except the recitations
of Teed, who crashed through the classics like a bull in a china-shop
or, as Litton's Greeks put it, like an ass among beehives.
During those black days when Litton had quarreled with Martha he had
fiercely reminded Teed that only a month remained before his final
examinations, and warned him that he would hold him strictly to account.
No classics, no diploma!
Teed had sulked and moped while Litton sulked and moped; but when Litton
was reconciled to Martha the sun seemed to come out on Teed's clouded
world, too. He took a sudden extra interest in his electrical studies
and obtained permission to work in the laboratory overtime. He obtained
permission even to visit the big city for certain apparatus. And he
wrote the despondent, distant Fannie Newman that there would "shortly
be something doing in the classics."