[1] Copyright, 1925, by Edward Hope.
The Sunday morning after the game there were many students and
graduates of the Yale persuasion who claimed that young Mr.
Gildersleeve of Princeton was a lucky stiff. In New York, New Haven,
and I doubt not, Hartford, they called upon Heaven to punish him and
to lay a curse on the unkind fate which had guided a Yale forward
pass into his arms during the last quarter, with the score Yale 3,
Princeton 0. It was not, however, until the event had been almost
forgotten in undergraduate circles that George Banks began to harbor
a grudge against young Mr. Gildersleeve for his glorious run. For
Gildersleeve had inadvertently brought a great deal of sorrow upon
George Banks's head, although George was a recent Princeton graduate
and should normally have benefited, both financially and spiritually,
by the victory.
This is how it was:
When George asked Mildred Trudeau to go to the game with him--and in
fact right up to the moment when Gildersleeve's cleats tore a chunk
out of the Yale goal line--she seemed to him to be quite an ordinary
sort of last year's débutante.
Pretty, of course, or she never would have been honored with the
invitation. But otherwise a little blah. Good mouth, a mouth a
fellow might kiss with a certain amount of satisfaction, but not a
mouth from which wisdom could reasonably be expected. Pretty eyes,
but no suggestion of anything behind them except a blue back drop.
Nice, even features, but too even for much character.
That was, as I have said, George Banks's estimate of Mildred Trudeau
until close to the end of the fourth quarter, up to which point he
was what you might call a rational young man.
But Gildersleeve's run did something to George Banks's entire being.
At its conclusion he pounded the back of the ponderous, middle-aged
gentleman in front of him. He emitted a yell which would have set a
high standard of audibility for a locomotive whistle. He flung both
arms around Mildred Trudeau and hugged her as, I hope, she had never
been hugged before.
He tore off his rather modish gray felt hat and scaled it toward the
field. He drank at some length from a frankly illegal square bottle
and whooped again louder than before.
As they changed Princeton's 6 on the scoreboard to a 7, George Banks
augmented the loss of his hat with the loss of its erstwhile
contents. During the minute that remained of the game he babbled and
gurgled and laughed into the ear of Mildred Trudeau like one bereft
of his senses. Again and again he besought her to tell him if she
had ever seen anything like that before. And she showed her teeth,
which had been well spoken of, and tried to be as excited as he was,
which was absurd.
Even after the game his exaltation held. Outwardly he became a
little calmer, but his heart thumped with the fullness of his
emotion. He found himself overwhelmed with a love of the world he
lived in, of the human race in general, and of Mildred Trudeau, with
whom he had shared this transfiguration, in particular. Walking with
her, he squeezed her fur-coated arm until her shoulder was in grave
danger of dislocation.
Presently, when they were buttoned into George's roadster, protected
from the cold November wind, his love of things in general focused
itself more and more on his companion. The girl at his side was
warmish and smallish and very much his.
Before they got to New Brunswick he told her intimate details about
himself and the peculiarities of his mind.
Just past the Raritan bridge he slipped one of his hands into both of
hers.
Right in the middle of Metuchen he put his arm around her.
A couple of miles farther on he kissed her tentatively.
A minute or two beyond Rahway he asked her to marry him.
He alleged--in a voice that carried surprising conviction--that he
had loved her passionately ever since he had first met her, though
that would have taken him back through the Dorothy Husted era into
the time of Louise Vanderlin, as he might have remembered. He told
her that he had loved her always, for that matter, for she was the
ideal for whom he had sought.
To give her a chance to answer, he stopped the roadster with a
suddenness which nearly caused horrible carnage in the line of cars
behind.
When she raised her eyes to his and said that she would marry him if
her mother would let her, you might have expected him to realize the
enormity of the thing he had done.
He did not. Rather, he bent his head a little and drew her face
close to his, murmuring "My dear, my dear" in a whisper he could not
help admiring, if he did it himself, who shouldn't have. He found
his exaltation increased by this new entanglement. The jeers of
home-going football fans seeped through the side curtains, but he
heeded them not. He kissed her rather thoroughly.
The rest of the journey was joy unstinted.
She told him things about his charms that even he had never
suspected. He answered with gallantries he would have labeled the
grossest sort of exaggeration a few hours before. They planned how
they would tell her mother, and his father and mother and kid sister.
They speculated joyously about how astonished Marian would be and
what Paul would say. Stalled in the line of cars on the hill leading
to the ferry, they petted shamelessly.
That is a brief explanation of the resentment toward Gildersleeve of
Princeton which grew and grew in the heart of George Banks toward the
last of the year; a resentment which became stronger as the New Year
came in and January and February passed, and Mildred Trudeau was in
fact the _fiancée_ of George Banks, and was turning out to be, as he
had suspected, pretty, but otherwise blah; quite hopelessly blah.
They went to deb parties at the Ritz and Sherry's and Pierre's. They
saw musical comedies and farces and plain comedies and melodramas
together. They became recognized and were bowed to in most of the
fashionable night clubs. They motored hither and yon in the environs
of New York. They were lavishly entertained at teas and dinners and
luncheons. By all ordinary standards they should have had a most
enjoyable winter.
Probably Mildred was having just that. Her picture appeared in the
papers with reasonable regularity. She was on whatever committees it
was right to be on. She was engaged to George Banks, who was no mean
catch socially, financially, and personally.
Through the eyes of the desirable young man, however, things were not
so satisfactory. This girl who seemed destined to be attached to him
for life fell several running broad jumps short of his ideal of
womanhood. She had looks and poise and serenity--and not another
visible gift. He knew by heart her answers to everything he might
conceivably say to her, which discouraged him from saying anything.
He knew even what she would do in any given set of circumstances,
which took most of the interest out of creating sets of
circumstances. She repeated herself with perfect regularity.
He knew her seven facial expressions as well as if he had had a
photograph of each with a descriptive caption: Disappointment,
Pleasure, Love, Annoyance, Surprise, Interest, Boredom--every one of
them mild.
She danced average well, but with an indefinable sense of heaviness.
She played bridge passably, but with too frequent recourse to the
wide-eyed look which is supposed to excuse misplay. Her conversation
was fair until you got onto her system, or until the talk slipped off
the field which is covered by the society columns. Her intellectual
interests were limited to an attempt to classify everything she came
in contact with as either nice or vulgar.
For some men, no doubt, she would have been an ideal mate. George
credited her with this possibility. The elder Bankses seemed to
approve her as prospective daughter-in-law. Young men who knew her
slightly congratulated George on her charms with unlimited fervor.
He was even willing to admit that the whole trouble might be the
result of something wrong with his own make-up; but the main point
was that there was something awfully wrong with some one. That he
knew.