THE men at the club were horridly busy that night discussing the silly
English law about marrying your dead wife's sister. The talk was quite
rabid enough even before an English High-churchman infused his pious
venom into the subject-matter. When the argument was at its highest and
the drinks were at their lowest, Bertus Sagner, the biology man at the
university, jumped up from his seat with blazing eyes and said
"RATS!"--not anything long and Latin, not anything obscure and evasive,
not even "rodents," but just plain "RATS!" The look on his face was
inordinately disgusted, or indeed more than disgusted, unless disgust is
perhaps an emotion that may at times be served red-hot. As he broke away
from the gabbling crowd and began to hunt noisily round the room for his
papers, I gathered up my own chemistry notebook and started after him. I
was a new man in town and a comparative stranger. But Sagner and I had
been chums once long ago in Berlin.
At the outside door he turned now and eyed me a bit shamefacedly.
"Barney, old man," he said, "are you going my way? Well, come along."
The broad-shouldered breadth of the two of us blocked out the light from
the shining chandelier and sent our clumsy feet fairly stumbling down
the harsh granite steps. The jarring lurch exploded Sagner's irritation
into a short, sharp, damny growl, and I saw at once that his nerves were
raw like a woman's.
As we turned into the deep-shadowed, spooky-black college roadway, the
dormitories' yellow lights and laughter flared forth grotesquely like
the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge cut up for a Jack-o'-Lantern. At the
edge of the Lombardy poplars I heard Sagner swallowing a little bit
overhard.
"I suspect that I made rather a fool of myself back there," he confided
abruptly, "but if there's anything under the day or night sky that makes
me mad, it's the idiotic babble, babble, babble, these past few weeks
about the 'dead wife's sister' law."
"What's your grouch?" I asked. "You're not even a married man, let alone
a widower."
He stopped suddenly with a spurting match and a big cigar and lighted up
unconsciously all the extraordinary frowning furrows of his face. The
match went out and he struck another, and that match went out and he
struck another--and another, and all the time it seemed to me as though
just the flame in his face was hot enough to kindle any ordinary cigar.
After each fruitless, breeze-snuffed effort he snapped his words out
like so many tiny, tempery torpedoes. "Of--all--the--rot!" he
ejaculated. "Of--all--the nonsense!" he puffed and mumbled.
"A--whole--great, grown-up empire fussing and brawling about a 'dead
wife's sister.' A dead wife! What does a dead wife care who marries her
sister? Great heavens! If they really want to make a good moral law that
will help somebody, why--don't--they--make--a--law--that will forbid a
man's flirting with his living wife's sister?"
When I laughed I thought he would strike me, but after a husky second he
laughed, too, through a great blue puff of smoke and a blaze like the
headlight of an engine. In another instant he had vaulted the low fence
and was starting off across lots for his own rooms, but before I could
catch up with him he whirled abruptly in his tracks and came back to me.
"Will you come over to the Lennarts' with me for a moment?" he asked. "I
was there at dinner with them to-night and I left my spectacles."
Very willingly I acquiesced, and we plunged off single file into the
particular darkness that led to Professor Lennart's rose-garden.
Somewhere remotely in my mind hummed and halted a vague, evasive bit of
man-gossip about Lennart's amazingly pretty sister-in-law. Yet Sagner
did not look exactly to me like a man who was going courting. Even in
that murky darkness I could visualize perfectly from Sagner's pose and
gait the same strange, bleak, facial furnishings that had attracted me
so astoundingly in Berlin--the lean, flat cheeks cleaned close as the
floor of a laboratory; the ugly, short-cropped hair; the mouth, just for
work; the nose, just for work; the ears, just for work--not a single,
decorative, pleasant thing from crown to chin except those great, dark,
gorgeous, miraculously virgin eyes, with the huge, shaggy eyebrows
lowering down prudishly over them like two common doormats on which
every incoming vision must first stop and wipe its feet. Once in a cafe
in Berlin I saw a woman try to get into Sagner's eyes--without stopping.
Right in the middle of our dinner I jumped as though I had been shot.
"Why, what was _that_?" I cried. "What was _that_?"
"What was what?" drawled Sagner. Try as I might the tiniest flicker of a
grin tickled my lips. "Oh, nothing," I mumbled apologetically. "I just
thought I heard a door slam-bang in a woman's face."
"What door?" said Sagner stupidly. "What woman?"
Old Sagner was deliciously stupid over many things, but he dissected the
darkness toward Professor Lennart's house as though it had been his
favorite kind of cadaver. Here, was the hardening turf, compact as
flesh. There, was the tough, tight tendon of the ripping ground pine.
Farther along under an exploring match a great vapid peony loomed like a
dead heart. Somewhere out in an orchard the May-blooms smelled
altogether too white. Almost at the edge of the Lennarts' piazza he
turned and stepped back to my pace and began talking messily about some
stale biological specimen that had just arrived from the Azores.
College people, it seemed, did not ring bells for one another, and the
most casual flop of Sagner's knuckles against the door brought Mrs.
Lennart almost immediately to welcome us. "Almost immediately," I say,
because the slight, faltering delay in her footfall made me wonder even
then whether it was limb or life that had gone just a little bit lame.
But the instant the hall light struck her face my hand clutched down
involuntarily on Sagner's shoulder. It was the same, same face whose
brighter, keener, shinier pastelled likeness had been the only joyous
object in Sagner's homesick German room. With almost embarrassing
slowness now we followed her lagging steps back to the library.
It was the first American home that I had seen for some years, and the
warmth of it, and the color, and the glow, and the luxurious,
deep-seated comfort, mothered me like the notes of an old, old song.
Between the hill-green walls the long room stretched like a peaceful
valley to the very edge of the huge, gray field-stone fireplace that
blocked the final vista like a furious breastwork raised against all the
invading tribes of history. Red books and gold frames and a
chocolate-colored bronze or two caught up the flickering glint from the
apple-wood fire, and out of some shadowy corner flanked by a grand piano
a young girl's contralto voice, sensuous as liquid plush, was lipping
its magic way up and down the whole wonderful, molten scale.
The corner was rather small, but out of it loomed instantly the tall,
supple figure of Professor Lennart with his thousand-year-old brown eyes
and his young gray hair. We were all big fellows, but Lennart towered
easily three inches over anybody else's head. Professionally, too, he
had outstripped the rest of us. People came gadding from all over the
country to consult his historical criticisms and interpretations. And I
hardly know how to express the man's vivid, luminous, incandescent
personality. Surely no mother in a thousand would have chosen to have
her son look like me, and I hope that no mother in a million would
really have yearned to have a boy look like Sagner, but any mother, I
think, would gladly have compromised on Lennart. I suppose he was
handsome. Rising now, as he did, from the murkiest sort of a shadow, the
mental and physical radiance of him made me want to laugh right out loud
just for sheer pleasure.
Following closely behind his towering bulk, the girl with the contralto
voice stepped out into the lamplight, and I made my most solemn and
profound German bow over her proffered hand before the flaming mischief
in her finger tips sent my eyes staring up into her astonishing face.
I have never thought that American women are extraordinarily beautiful,
but rather that they wear their beauty like a thinnish sort of veil
across the adorable, insistent expressiveness of their features. But
this girl's face was so thick with beauty that you could not tell in one
glance, or even two glances, or perhaps three, whether she had any
expression at all. Kindness or meanness, brightness or dullness, pluck
or timidity, were absolutely undecipherable in that physically perfect
countenance. She was very small, and very dark, and very active, with
hair like the color of eight o'clock--daylight and darkness and
lamplight all snarled up together--and lips all crude scarlet, and eyes
as absurdly big and round as a child's good-by kiss. Yet never for one
instant could you have called her anything so impassive as "attractive."
"Attracting" is the only hasty, ready-made word that could possibly fit
her. Personally I do not like the type. The prettiest picture postal
that ever was printed could not lure me across the borders of any
unknown country. When I travel even into Friendship Land I want a good,
clear face-map to guide my explorations.
There was a boy, too, in the room--the Lennarts' son--a brown-faced lad
of thirteen whose algebraic seance with his beloved mother we had most
brutally interrupted.
Professor Lennart's fad, as I have said, was history. Mrs. Lennart's fad
was presumably housekeeping. The sister-in-law's fad was unmistakably
men. Like an electric signboard her fascinating, spectacular sex-vanity
flamed and flared from her coyly drooped eyes to her showy little feet.
Every individual gesture signaled distinctly, "I am an extraordinarily
beautiful little woman." Now it was her caressing hand on Lennart's
shoulder; now it was her maddening, dazzling smile hurled like a
bombshell into Sagner's perfectly prosy remark about the weather, now
it was her teasing lips against the boy's tousled hair; now it was her
tip-toeing, swaying, sweet-breathed exploration of a cobweb that the
linden trees had left across my shoulder.
Lennart was evidently utterly subjugated. Like a bright moth and a very
dull flame the girl chased him unceasingly from one chair, or one word,
or one laugh to another. A dozen times their hands touched, or their
smiles met, or their thoughts mated in distinctly personal if not secret
understanding. Once when Mrs. Lennart stopped suddenly in the midst of
my best story and asked me to repeat what I had been saying, I glanced
up covertly and saw the girl kissing the tip of her finger a little bit
over-mockingly to her brother-in-law. Never in any country but America
could such a whole scene have been enacted in absolute moral innocence.
It made me half ashamed and half very proud of my country. In
continental Europe even the most trivial, innocent audacity assumes at
once such utterly preposterous proportions of evil. But here before my
very eyes was the most dangerous man-and-woman game in the world being
played as frankly and ingenuously and transiently as though it had been
croquet.
Through it all, Sagner, frowning like ten devils, sat at the desk with
his chin in his hands, staring--staring at the girl. I suppose that she
thought he was fascinated. He was. He was fairly yearning to vivisect
her. I had seen that expression before in his face--reverence,
repulsion, attraction, distaste, indomitable purpose, blood-curdling
curiosity--SCIENCE.
When I dragged him out of the room and down the steps half an hour later
my sides were cramped with laughter. "If we'd stayed ten minutes
longer," I chuckled, "she would have called you 'Bertie' and me 'Boy.'"
But Sagner would not laugh.
"She's a pretty girl all right," I ventured again.
"Pretty as h--," whispered Sagner.
As we rounded the corner of the house the long French window blazed
forth on us. Clear and bright in the lamplight stood Lennart with his
right arm cuddling the girl to his side. "Little sister," he was saying,
"let's go back to the piano and have some more music." Smiling her
kindly good night we saw Mrs. Lennart gather up her books and start off
limpingly across the hall, with the devoted boy following close behind
her.
"Then she's really lame?" I asked Sagner as we swung into the noisy
gravel path.
"Oh, yes," he said; "she got hurt in a runaway accident four years ago.
Lennart doesn't know how to drive a _goat_!"
"Seems sort of too bad," I mused dully.
Then Sagner laughed most astonishingly. "Yes, sort of too bad," he
mocked me.
It was almost ten o'clock when we circled back to the college library.
Only a few grinds were there buzzing like June-bugs round the
low-swinging green lamps. Even the librarian was missing. But Madge
Hubert, the librarian's daughter, was keeping office hours in his stead
behind a sumptuous old mahogany desk. At the very first college party
that I had attended, Madge Hubert had been pointed out to me with a
certain distinction as being the girl that Bertus Sagner was _almost_ in
love with. Then, as now, I was startled by the surprising youthfulness
of her. Surely she was not more than three years ahead of the young girl
whom we had left at Professor Lennart's house. With unmistakable
friendly gladness she welcomed Sagner to the seat nearest her, and
accorded me quite as much chair and quite as much smile as any new man
in a university town really deserved. In another moment she had closed
her book, pushed a full box of matches across the table to us, and
switched off the electric light that fairly threatened to scorch her
straight blond hair.
One by one the grinds looked up and nodded and smiled, and puckered
their vision toward the clock, and "folded their tents like the Arabs
and silently stole away," leaving us two men there all alone with the
great silent room, and the long, rangy, echoing metal book-stacks, and
the duddy-looking portraits, and the dopy-acting busts, and the sleek
gray library cat--and the girl. Maybe Sagner came every Wednesday night
to help close the library.
Certainly I liked the frank, almost boyish manner in which the two
friends included me in their friendship by seeming to ignore me
altogether.
"What's the matter, Bertus?" the girl began quite abruptly. "You look
worried. What's the matter?"
"Nothing is ever the matter," said Sagner.
The girl laughed, and began to build a high, tottering paper tower out
of a learned-looking pack of catalogue cards. Just at the moment of
completion she gave a sharp little inadvertent sigh and the tower
fluttered down.
"What's the matter with _you_?" quizzed Sagner.
"Nothing is ever the matter with me, either," she mocked smilingly.
Trying to butt into the silence that was awkward for me, if not for
them, I rummaged my brain for speech, and blurted out triumphantly,
"We've just come from Professor Lennart's."
"Just come from Professor Lennart's?" she repeated slowly, lifting her
eyebrows as though the thought was a little bit heavy.
"Yes," said Sagner bluntly. "I've been there twice this evening."
With a rather playful twist of her lips the girl turned to me. "What did
you think of 'Little Sister'?" she asked.
But before I could answer, Sagner had pushed me utterly aside once more
and was shaking his smoke-stained finger threateningly in Madge Hubert's
face. "Why--didn't--you--come--to the--Lennarts'--to--dinner--to-night
--as--you--were--invited?" he scolded.
The girl put her chin in her hand and cuddled her fingers over her mouth
and her nose and part of her blue eyes.
"I don't go to the Lennarts' any more--if I can help it," she mumbled.
"Why not?" shouted Sagner.
She considered the question very carefully, then "Go ask the other
girls," she answered a trifle hotly. "Go ask any one of them. We all
stay away for exactly the same reason."
"WHAT IS THE REASON?" thundered Sagner in his most terrible laboratory
manner.
When Sagner speaks like that to me, I always grab hold of my head with
both hands and answer just as fast as I possibly can, for I remember
only too distinctly all the shining assortment of different sized knives
and scalpels in his workshop and I have always found that a small,
narrow, quick question makes the smallest, narrowest, quickest,
soon-overest incision into my secret.
But Madge Hubert only laughed at the laboratory manner.
"Say 'Please,'" she whispered.
"Please!" growled Sagner, with his very own blood flushing all over his
face and hands.
"Now--what is it you want to know?" she asked, frittering her fingers
all the time over that inky-looking pack of catalogue cards.
Somehow, strange as it may seem, I did not feel an atom in the way, but
rather that the presence of a third person, and that person myself, gave
them both a certain daring bravado of speech that they would scarcely
have risked alone with each other.
"What do I want to know?" queried Sagner. "I want to know--in fact--I'm
utterly mad to know--just what your kind of woman thinks of 'Little
Sister's' kind of woman."
With a startled gesture Madge Hubert looked back over her shoulder
toward a creak in the literature book-stack, and Sagner jumped up with a
great air of mock conspiracy, and went tip-toeing all around among the
metal corridors in search of possible eavesdroppers, and then came
flouncing back and stuffed tickly tissue paper into the gray cat's
ears.
Then "Why don't you girls go to the Lennarts' any more?" he resumed with
quickly recurrent gravity.
For a moment Madge Hubert dallied to shuffle one half of her pack of
cards into the other half. Then she looked up and smiled the blond way a
white-birch tree smiles in the sunshine.
"Why--we don't go any more because we don't have a good time," she
confided. "After you've come home from a party once or twice and cried
yourself to sleep, it begins to dawn on you very gradually that you
didn't have a very good time. We don't like 'Little Sister.' She makes
us feel ashamed."
"Oh!" said Sagner, rather brutally. "You are all jealous!"
But if he had expected for a second to disconcert Madge Hubert he was
most ingloriously mistaken.
"Yes," she answered perfectly simply. "We are all jealous."
"Of her beauty?" scowled Sagner.
"Oh, no," said Madge Hubert. "Of her innocence."
Acid couldn't have eaten the fiber out of Madge Hubert's emotional
honesty. "Why, yes," she hurried on vehemently, "among all the
professors' daughters here in town there isn't one of us who is innocent
enough to do happily even once the things that 'Little Sister' does
every day of her life. You are quite right. We are all furiously
jealous."
With sudden professional earnestness she ran her fingers through the
catalogue cards and picked out one and slapped it down in front of
Sagner. "There!" she said. "That's the book that explains all about it.
It says that jealousy is an emotion that is aroused only by business
competition, which accounts, of course, for the fact that, socially
speaking, you very rarely find any personal enmity between men. There
are so many, many different kinds of businesses for men, that interests
very seldom conflict--so that the broker resents _only_ the broker, and
the minister resents _only_ the minister, and the merchant resents
_only_ the merchant. Why, Bertus Sagner," she broke off abruptly, "you
fairly idolize your chemistry friend here, and Lennart for history, and
Dudley for mathematics, and all the others, and you glory in their
achievements, and pray for their successes. But if there were another
biology man here in town, you'd tear him and his methods tooth and nail,
day and night. Yes, you would!--though you'd cover your hate a foot deep
with superficial courtesies and 'professional etiquette.'"
She began to laugh. "Oh, the book is very wise," she continued more
lightly. "It goes on to say that woman's only business in the whole
wide world is LOVE--that Love is really the one and only, the Universal
Profession for Women--so that every mortal feminine creature, from the
brownest gypsy to the whitest queen, is in brutal, acute competition
with her neighbor. It's funny, isn't it!" she finished brightly.
"Very funny," growled Sagner.
"So you see," she persisted, "that we girls are jealous of 'Little
Sister' in just about the same way in which an old-fashioned, rather
conservative department store would be jealous of the first ten-cent
store that came to town." A sudden rather fine white pride paled
suddenly in her cheeks. "It isn't, you understand," she said, "it isn't
because the ten-cent store's rhinestone comb, or tinsel ribbon, or
slightly handled collar really competes with the other store's plainer
but possibly honester values, but--because in the long run the public's
frittered taste and frittered small change is absolutely bound to affect
the general receipts of the more conservative store."
"And it isn't," she added hastily, "it isn't, you know, because we're
not used to men. There isn't one of us--from the time we were sixteen
years old--who hasn't been quite accustomed to entertain anywhere from
three to a dozen men every evening of her life. But we can't entertain
them the way 'Little Sister' does." A hot, red wave of mortification
flooded her face. "We tried it once," she confessed, "and it didn't
work. Just before the last winter party seven of us girls got together
and deliberately made up our minds to beat 'Little Sister' at her own
game. Wasn't it disgusting of us to start out actually and deliberately
with the intention of being just a little wee bit free and easy with
men?"
"How did it work?" persisted Sagner, half agrin.
The color flushed redder and redder into Madge Hubert's cheeks.
"I went to the party with the new psychology substitute," she continued
bravely, "and as I stepped into the carriage I called him 'Fred'--and he
looked as though he thought I was demented. But fifteen minutes
afterward I heard 'Little Sister' call him 'Psyche'--and he laughed."
She began to laugh herself.
"But how did the party come out?" probed Sagner, going deeper and
deeper.
The girl sobered instantly. "There were seven of us," she said, "and we
all were to meet at the house of one of the girls at twelve o'clock and
compare experiences. Three of us came home at ten o'clock--crying. And
four of us didn't turn up till half-past one--laughing. But the ones
who came home crying were the only ones who really had any fun out of
it. The game was altogether too easy--that was the trouble with it. But
the four who came home laughing had been bored to death with their
_un_-successes."
"Which lot were you in?" cried Sagner.
She shook her head. "I won't tell you," she whispered.
With almost startling pluck she jumped up suddenly and switched the
electric light full blast into her tense young face and across her
resolute shoulders.
"Look at me!" she cried. "Look at me! As long as men are men--what have
I that can possibly, possibly compete with a girl like 'Little Sister'?
Can I climb up into a man's face every time I want to speak to him? Can
I pat a man's shoulder every time he passes me in a room? Can I hold out
my quivering white hand and act perfectly helpless in a man's presence
every time that I want to step into a carriage, or out of a chair? Can I
cry and grieve and mope into a man's arms at a dance just because I
happen to cut my finger on the sharp edge of my dance-order? Bah! If a
new man came to town and made not one single man-friend but called all
of us girls by our first names the second time he saw us, and rolled his
eyes at us, and fluttered his hands, you people would call him the
biggest fool in Christendom--but you flock by the dozens and the
hundreds and the millions every evening to see 'Little Sister.' And
great, grown-up, middle-aged boys like _you_, Bertus Sagner, flock
_twice_ in the same evening!"
With astounding irrelevance Sagner burst out laughing. "Why, Madge," he
cried, "you're perfectly superb when you're mad. Keep it up. Keep it up.
I didn't know you had it in you! Why, you dear, gorgeous girl--WHY
AREN'T YOU MARRIED?"
Like a scarlet lightning-bolt spiked with two-edged knives the red wrath
of the girl descended then and there on Sagner's ugly head. With her
heaving young shoulders braced like a frenzied creature at bay, against
a great, silly, towering tier of "Latest Novels," she hurled her
flaming, irrevocable answer crash-bang into Sagner's astonished,
impertinent face.
"You want to know why I'm not married?" she cried. "You want to know why
I'm not married? Well, I'll tell you--why--I'm--not married, Bertus
Sagner, and I'll use yourself for an illustration--for when I do come to
marry, it is written in the stars that I must of necessity marry your
kind, a mature, cool, calculating, emotionally-tamed man, a man of brain
as well as brawn, a man of fame if not of fortune, a man bred
intellectually, morally, socially, into the same wonderfully keen,
thinky corner of the world where I was born--nothing but a woman.
"For four years, Bertus Sagner, ever since I was nineteen years old,
people have come stumbling over each other at college receptions to
stare at me because I am 'the girl that Bertus Sagner, the big
biologist, is _almost_ in love with.' And you _are_ 'almost' in love
with me, Bertus Sagner. You can't deny it! And what is more, you will
stay 'almost' in love with me till our pulses run down like clocks, and
our eyes burn out like lamps, and the Real Night comes. If I remain here
in this town, even when I am middle-aged--people will come and stare at
me--because of you. And when I am old, and you are gone--altogether,
people will still be talking about it. 'Almost in love' with me. Yes,
Bertus Sagner, but if next time you came to see me, I should even so
much as dally for a second on the arm of your chair, and slip my hand
just a little bit tremulously into yours, and brush my lips like the
ghost of a butterfly's wing across your love-starved face, you would
probably find out then and there in one great, blinding, tingling,
crunching flash that you LOVE ME NOW! But I don't want _you_, Bertus
Sagner, nor any other man, at that price. The man who was made for me
will love me first and get his petting afterward. There! Do you
understand now?"
As though Sagner's gasp for breath was no more than the flutter of a
book-leaf, she plunged on, "And as for Mrs. Lennart--"
Sagner jumped to his feet. "We weren't talking about Mrs. Lennart," he
exclaimed hotly.
It has always seemed to me that very few things in the world are as
quick as a woman's anger. But nothing in the world, I am perfectly
positive, is as quick as a woman's amusement. As though an anarchist's
bomb had exploded into confetti, Madge Hubert's sudden laughter sparkled
through the room.
"Now, Bertus Sagner," she teased, "you just sit down again and listen to
what I have to say."
Sagner sat down.
And as casually as though she were going to pour afternoon tea the girl
slipped back into her own chair, and gave me a genuinely mirthful
side-glance before she resumed her attack on Sagner.
"You were, too, talking about Mrs. Lennart," she insisted. "When you
asked me to tell you exactly what a girl of my kind thinks of a girl
like 'Little Sister,' do you suppose for a second I didn't understand
that the thing you really wanted to find out was whether Mrs. Lennart
was getting hurt or not in this 'Little Sister' business? Oh, no, Mrs.
Lennart hasn't been hurt for a long, long time--several months perhaps.
I think she looks a little bit bored now and then, but not hurt."
"Lennart's a splendid fellow," protested Sagner.
"He's a splendid fool," said Madge Hubert. "And after a woman once
discovers that her husband is a fool I don't suppose that any extra
illustrations on his part make any particular difference to her."
"Why, you don't--really think," stammered Sagner, "that there's any
actual harm in Lennart's perfectly frank infatuation with 'Little
Sister'?"
"Oh, no," said Madge Hubert, "of course there's no real harm in it at
all. It's only that Mrs. Lennart has got to realize once for all that
the special public that she has catered to so long and faithfully with
honest values and small profit, has really got a ten-cent taste! Most
men have. And it isn't, you know, because Professor Lennart really wants
or needs all these ten-cent toys and favors, but because he probably
never before in all his studious, straight, idealistic life saw
glittering nonsense so inordinately cheap and easy to get. Talk about
women being 'bargain-hunters'!
"But, of course, it's all pretty apt to ruin Mrs. Lennart's business.
Anybody with half a heart could see that her stock is beginning to run
down. She hasn't put in a new idea for months. She's wearing last
year's clothes. She's thinking last year's thoughts. Even that blessed
smile of hers is beginning to get just a little bit stale. You can't get
what you want from her any more. Dust and indifference have already
begun to set in. How will it end? Oh, I'll tell you how it will end.
Pretty soon now college will be over and the men will scatter in five
hundred different directions, and 'Little Sister' will be smitten
suddenly with conscientious scruples about the 'old folks at home,' and
will pack up her ruffles and her fraternity pins and go back to the
provincial little town that has made her what she is. And Professor
Lennart will mope around the house like a lost soul--for as much as five
days--moaning, 'Oh, I wish "Little Sister" was here to-night to sing to
me,' and 'I wish "Little Sister" was going to be here to-morrow to go
canoeing with me,' and 'I wish "Little Sister" could see this
moonlight,' and 'I wish "Little Sister" could taste this wild-strawberry
pie.' And then somewhere about the sixth day, when he and Mrs. Lennart
are at breakfast or dinner or supper, he'll look up suddenly like a man
just freed from a delirium, and drop his cup, or his knife, or his fork
'ker-smash' into his plate, and cry out, 'My Heavens, Mary! But it's
pretty good just for _you_ and _me_ to be alone together again!'"
"And what will Mrs. Lennart say?" interposed Sagner hastily, with a
great puff of smoke.
For some unaccountable reason Madge Hubert's eyes slopped right over
with tears.
"What will Mary Lennart say?" she repeated. "Mary Lennart will say:
'Excuse me, dear, but I wasn't listening. I didn't hear what you said. I
was trying to remember whether or not I'd put moth-balls in your winter
suit.' Though he live to be nine hundred and sixty-two, Harold Lennart's
love-life will never rhyme again. But prose, of course, is a great deal
easier to live than verse."
As though we had all been discussing the latest foreign theory
concerning microbes, Sagner jumped up abruptly and began to rummage
furiously through a pile of German bulletins. When he had found and read
aloud enough things that he didn't want, he looked up and said
nonchalantly, "Let's go home."
"All right," said Madge Hubert.
"Maybe you hadn't noticed that I was here," I suggested, "but I think
that perhaps I should like to go home, too."
As we banged the big, oaken, iron-clamped door behind us, Madge Hubert
lingered a second and turned her white face up to the waning, yellow
moonlight. "I think I'd like to go home through the dark woods," she
decided.
Silently we all turned down into the soft, padded path that ran along
the piny shore of our little college lake. Sagner of course led the way.
Madge Hubert followed close. And I tagged along behind as merrily as I
could. Twice I saw the girl's shoulders shudder.
"Don't you like the woods, Miss Hubert?" I called out experimentally.
She stopped at once and waited for me to catch up with her. There was
the very faintest possible suggestion of timidity in the action.
"Don't you like the woods?" I repeated.
She shook her head. "No, not especially," she answered. "That is, not
all woods. There's such a difference. Some woods feel as though they had
violets in them, and some woods feel as though they had--Indians."