"You may tell them that she is better."

Mrs. Cowles shivered. No one could possibly have looked more like a person closing a door without actually closing one. "Lena!" she shrieked, "close the kitchen door. There's a draught." She turned back to Carl.

The shy lover vanished. An angry young man challenged, "If Gertie 's up I think I'll come in a few minutes and see her."

"Why, uh----" hesitated Mrs. Cowles.

He merely walked in past her. His anger kept its own council, for he could depend upon Gertie's warm greeting--lonely Gertie, he would bring her the cheer of the great open.

The piano sounded in the library, and the voice of the one perfect girl mingled with a man's tenor in "Old Black Joe." Carl stalked into the library. Gertie was there, much corseted, well powdered, wearing a blue foulard frenziedly dotted with white, and being cultured in company with Dr. Doyle, the lively young dentist who had recently taken an office in the National Bank Block. He was a graduate of the University of Minnesota--dental department. He had oily black hair, and smiled with gold-filled teeth before one came to the real point of a joke. He sang in the Congregational church choir, and played tennis in a crimson-and-black blazer--the only one in Joralemon.

To Carl Dr. Doyle was dismayingly mature and smart. He horribly feared him as a rival. For the second time that evening he did not balk fate by fearing it. The dentist was a rival. After fluttering about the mature charms of Miss Dietz, the school drawing-teacher, and taking a tentative buggy-ride or two with the miller's daughter, Dr. Doyle was bringing all the charm of his professional position and professional teeth and patent-leather shoes to bear upon Gertie.

And Gertie was interested. Obviously. She was all of eighteen to-night. She frowned slightly as she turned on the piano-stool at Carl's entrance, and mechanically: "This is a pleasant surprise."

Then, enthusiastically: "Isn't it too bad that Dr. Doyle was out of town, or I would have invited him to my party, and he would have given us some of his lovely songs.... Do try the second verse, doctor. The harmony is so lovely."

Carl sat at the other end of the library from Gertie and the piano, while Mrs. Cowles entertained him. He obediently said "Yessum" and "No, 'm" to the observations which she offered from the fullness of her lack of experience of life. He sat straight and still. Behind his fixed smile he was simultaneously longing to break into the musical fiesta, and envying the dentist's ability to get married without having to wait to grow up, and trying to follow what Mrs. Cowles was saying.

She droned, while crocheting with high-minded industry a useless piano-scarf, "Do you still go hunting, Carl?"

"Yessum. Quite a little rabbit-hunting. Oh, not very much."

(At the distant piano, across the shining acres of floor, the mystical woman and a dentist had ceased singing, and were examining a fresh sheet of music. The dentist coyly poked his finger at her coiffure, and she slapped the finger, gurgling.)

"I hope you don't neglect your school work, though, Carl." Mrs. Cowles held the scarf nearer the lamp and squinted at it, deliberately and solemnly, through the eye-gla.s.ses that lorded it atop her severe nose.

A headachy scent of moth-b.a.l.l.s was in the dull air. She forbiddingly moved the shade of the lamp about a tenth of an inch. She removed some non-existent dust from the wrought-iron standard. Her gestures said that the lamp was decidedly more chic than the pink-shaded hanging lamps, raised and lowered on squeaking chains, which characterized most Joralemon living-rooms. She glanced at the red lambrequin over the nearest window. The moth-ball smell grew more stupifying.

Carl felt stuffy in the top of his nose as he mumbled, "Oh, I work pretty hard at chemistry, but, gee! I can't see much to all this Latin."

"When you're a little _older_, Carl, you'll _learn_ that the things you like now aren't necessarily the things that are _good_ for you. I used to say to Gertrude--of course she is older than you, but she hasn't been a young lady for so very long, even yet--and I used to say to her, 'Gertrude, you will do exactly what I _tell_ you to, and not what you _want_ to do, and we shall make--no--more--words--_about_ it!' And I think she _sees_ now that her mother was right about some things! Dr. Doyle said to me, and of course you know, Carl, that he's a very fine scholar--our pastor told me that the doctor reads French better than _he_ does, and the doctor's told me some things about modern French authors that I didn't know, and I used to read French almost as well as English, when I was a girl, my teachers all told me--and he says that he thinks that Gertrude has a very fine mind, and he was _so_ glad that she hasn't been taken in by all this wicked, hysterical way girls have to-day of thinking they know more than their mothers."

"Yes, she is--Gertie is----I think she's got a very fine mind," Carl commented.

(From the other end of the room Gertie could be overheard confiding to the dentist in tones of hushed and delicious adult scandal, "They say that when she was in St. Paul she----")

"So," Mrs. Cowles serenely sniffed on, while the bridge of Carl's nose felt broader and broader, stretching wider and wider, as that stuffy feeling increased and the intensive heat stung his eyelids, "you see you mustn't think because you'd rather play around with the boys than study Latin, Carl, that it's the fault of your Latin-teacher." She nodded at him with a condescending smile that was infinitely insulting.

He knew it and resented it, but he did not resent it actively, for he was busy marveling, "How the d.i.c.kens is it I never heard Doc Doyle was stuck on Gertie? Everybody thought he was going with Bertha. Dang him, anyway! The way he snickers, you'd think she was his best girl."

Mrs. Cowles was loftily pursuing her pillared way: "Latin was _known_ to be the best study for developing the mind a long, long time----"

And her clicking crochet-needles impishly echoed, "A long, _long_ time," and the odor of moth-b.a.l.l.s got down into Carl's throat, while in the golden Olympian atmosphere at the other end of the room Gertie coyly pretended to slap the dentist's hand with a series of t.i.ttering taps. "A long, _long_ time before either you or I were born, Carl, and we can't very well set ourselves up to be wiser than the wisest men that ever lived, now _can_ we?" Again the patronizing smile. "That would scarcely----"

Carl resolved: "This 's got to stop. I got to do something." He felt her monologue as a blank steel wall which he could not pierce. Aloud: "Yes, that's so, I guess. Say, that's a fine dress Gertie 's got on to-night, ain't it.... Say, I been learning to play crokinole at Ben Rusk's. You got a board, haven't you? Would you like to play? Does the doctor play?"

"Indeed, I haven't the slightest idea, but I have very little doubt that he does--he plays tennis so beautifully. He is going to teach Gertrude, in the spring." She stopped, and again held the scarf up to the light. "I am so glad that my girly, that was so naughty once and ran away with you--I don't think I shall _ever_ get over the awful fright I had that night!--I am so glad that, now she is growing up, clever people like Dr. Doyle appreciate her so much, so very much."

She dropped her crochet to her lap and stared squarely at Carl. Her warning that he would do exceedingly well to go home was more than plain. He stared back, agitated but not surrendering. Deliberately, almost suavely, with ten years of experience added to the sixteen years that he had brought into the room, he said:

"I'll see if they'd like to play." He sauntered to the other end of the room, abashed before the mystic woman, and ventured: "I saw Ray, to-day.... I got to be going, pretty quick, but I was wondering if you two felt like playing some crokinole?"

Gertie said, slowly: "I'd like to, Carl, but----Unless you'd like to play, doctor?"

"Why of course it's _comme il faut_ to play, Miss Cowles, but I was just hoping to have the pleasure of hearing you make some more of your delectable music," bowed the dentist, and Gertie bowed back; and their smiles joined in a glittery bridge of social aplomb.

"Oh yes," from Carl, "that--yes, do----But you hadn't ought to play too much if you haven't been well."

"Oh, Carl!" shrieked Gertie. "'Ought not to,' not 'hadn't ought to'!"

"'Ought not to,'" repeated Mrs. Cowles, icily, while the dentist waved his hand in an amused manner and contributed:

"Ought not to say 'hadn't ought to,' as my preceptor used to tell me.... I'd like to hear you sing Longfellow's 'Psalm of Life,' Miss Cowles."

"Don't you think Longfellow's a b.u.m poet?" growled Carl. "Bone Stillman says Longfellow's the grind-organ of poetry. Like this: 'Life is re-al, life is ear-nest, tum te diddle dydle dum!'"

"Carl," ordered Mrs. Cowles, "you will please to never mention that Stillman person in my house!"

"Oh, Carl!" rebuked Gertie. She rose from the piano-stool. Her essence of virginal femininity, its pure and cloistered and white-camisoled odor, bespelled Carl to fainting timidity. And while he was thus defenseless the dentist thrust:

"Why, they tell me Stillman doesn't even believe the Bible!"

Carl was not to retrieve his credit with Gertie, but he couldn't betray Bone Stillman. Hastily: "Yes, maybe, that way----Oh, say, doctor, Pete Jordan was telling me" (liar!) "that you were one of the best tennis-players at the U."

Gertie sat down again.

The dentist coyly fluffed his hair and deprecated, "Oh no, I wouldn't say that!"

Carl had won. Instantly they three became a country club of urban aristocrats, who laughed at the poor rustics of Joralemon for knowing nothing of golf and polo. Carl was winning their tolerance--though not their close attention--by relating certain interesting facts from the inside pages of the local paper as to how far the tennis-rackets sold in one year would extend, if laid end to end, when he saw Gertie and her mother glance at the hall. Gertie giggled. Mrs. Cowles frowned. He followed their glance.

Clumping through the hall was his second cousin, Lena, the Cowleses'

"hired girl." Lena nodded and said, "Hallo, Carl!"

Gertie and the dentist raised their eyebrows at each other.

Carl talked for two minutes about something, he did not know what, and took his leave. In the intensity of his effort to be resentfully dignified he stumbled over the hall hat-rack. He heard Gertie yelp with laughter.

"I _got_ to go to college--be worthy of her!" he groaned, all the way home. "And I can't afford to go to the U. of M. I'd like to be free, like Bone says, but I've got to go to Plato."

CHAPTER VI

Plato College, Minnesota, is as earnest and undistinguished, as provincially dull and pathetically human, as a spinster missionary.

Its two hundred or two hundred and fifty students come from the furrows, asking for spiritual bread, and are given a Greek root.

Red-brick buildings, designed by the architect of county jails, are grouped about that high, bare, cupola-crowned gray-stone barracks, the Academic Building, like red and faded blossoms about a tombstone. In the air is the scent of crab-apples and meadowy prairies, for a time, but soon settles down a winter bitter as the learning of the Rev. S.

Alcott Wood, D.D., the president. The town and college of Plato disturb the expanse of prairie scarce more than a group of haystacks.

In winter the walks blur into the general whiteness, and the trees shrink to chilly skeletons, and the college is like five blocks set on a frozen bed-sheet--no shelter for the warm and timid soul, yet no windy peak for the bold. The snow wipes out all the summer-time individuality of place, and the halls are lonelier at dusk than the prairie itself--far lonelier than the yellow-lighted jerry-built shops in the town. The students never lose, for good or bad, their touch with the fields. From droning cla.s.s-rooms the victims of education see the rippling wheat in summer; and in winter the impenetrable wall of sky. Footsteps and quick laughter of men and girls, furtively flirting along the brick walls under the beautiful maples, do make Plato dear to remember. They do not make it brilliant. They do not explain the advantages of leaving the farm for another farm.