“That’s why I kept quiet. Support can be too able—certainly too fluent.”
“There you are; the dog in the manger! You won’t let him discuss your affairs, and you are annoyed when he talks about his own.”
“I admit I can’t bear it when he talks about Outland as his affair. (I mean Tom, of course, not their confounded place!) This calling it after him passes my comprehension. And Rosamond’s standing for it! It’s brazen impudence.”
Mrs. St. Peter frowned pensively. “I knew you wouldn’t like it, but they were so pleased about it, and their motives are so generous—”
“Hang it, Outland doesn’t need their generosity! They’ve got everything he ought to have had, and the least they can do is to be quiet about it, and not convert his very bones into a personal asset. It all comes down to this, my dear: one likes the florid style, or one doesn’t. You yourself used not to like it. And will you give me some more coffee, please?”
She refilled his cup and handed it across the table. “Nice hands,” he murmured, looking critically at them as he took it, “always such nice hands.”
“Thank you. I dislike floridity when it is beaten up to cover the lack of something, to take the place of something. I never disliked it when it came from exuberance. Then it isn’t floridness, it’s merely strong colour.”
“Very well; some people don’t care for strong colour. It fatigues them.” He folded his napkin. “Now I must be off to my desk.”
“Not quite yet. You never have time to talk to me. Just when did it begin, Godfrey, in the history of manners—that convention that if a man were pleased with his wife or his house or his success, he shouldn’t say so, frankly?” Mrs. St. Peter spoke thoughtfully, as if she had considered this matter before.
“Oh, it goes back a long way. I rather think it began in the Age of Chivalry—King Arthur’s knights. Whoever it was lived in that time, some feeling grew up that a man should do fine deeds and not speak of them, and that he shouldn’t speak the name of his lady, but sing of her as a Phyllis or a Nicolette. It’s a nice idea, reserve about one’s deepest feelings: keeps them fresh.”
“The Oriental peoples didn’t have an Age of Chivalry. They didn’t need one,” Lillian observed. “And this reserve—it becomes in itself ostentatious, a vainglorious vanity.”
“Oh, my dear, all is vanity! I don’t dispute that. Now I must really go, and I wish I could play the game as well as you do. I have no enthusiasm for being a father-in-law. It’s you who keep the ball rolling. I fully appreciate that.”
“Perhaps,” mused his wife, as he rose, “it’s because you didn’t get the son-in-law you wanted. And yet he was highly coloured, too.”
The Professor made no reply to this. Lillian had been fiercely jealous of Tom Outland. As he left the house, he was reflecting that people who are intensely in love when they marry, and who go on being in love, always meet with something which suddenly or gradually makes a difference. Sometimes it is the children, or the grubbiness of being poor, sometimes a second infatuation. In their own case it had been, curiously enough, his pupil, Tom Outland.
St. Peter had met his wife in Paris, when he was but twenty-four, and studying for his doctorate. She too was studying there. French people thought her an English girl because of her gold hair and fair complexion. With her really radiant charm, she had a very interesting mind—but it was quite wrong to call it mind, the connotation was false. What she had was a richly endowed nature that responded strongly to life and art, and very vehement likes and dislikes which were often quite out of all proportion to the trivial object or person that aroused them. Before his marriage, and for years afterward, Lillian’s prejudices, her divinations about people and art (always instinctive and unexplained, but nearly always right), were the most interesting things in St. Peter’s life. When he accepted almost the first position offered him, in order to marry at once, and came to take the chair of European history at Hamilton, he was thrown upon his wife for mental companionship. Most of his colleagues were much older than he, but they were not his equals either in scholarship or in experience of the world. The only other man in the faculty who was carrying on important research work was Doctor Crane, the professor of physics. St. Peter saw a good deal of him, though outside his specialty he was uninteresting—a narrow-minded man, and painfully unattractive. Years ago Crane had begun to suffer from a malady which in time proved incurable, and which now sent him up for an operation periodically. St. Peter had had no friend in Hamilton of whom Lillian could possibly be jealous until Tom Outland came along, so well fitted by nature and early environment to help him with his work on the Spanish Adventurers.
When he had almost reached his old house and his study, the Professor remembered that he really must have an understanding with his landlord, or the place would be rented over his head. He turned and went down into another part of the city, by the car shops, where only workmen lived, and found his landlord’s little toy house, set on a hillside, over a basement faced up with red brick and covered with hop vines. Old Appelhoff was sitting on a bench before his door, making a broom. Raising broom corn was one of his economies. Beside him was his dachshund bitch, Minna.
St. Peter explained that he wanted to stay on in the empty house, and would pay the full rent each month. So irregular a project annoyed Appelhoff. “I like fine to oblige you, Professor, but dey is several parties looking at de house already, an’ I don’t like to lose a year’s rent for maybe a few months.”
“Oh, that’s all right, Fred. I’ll take it for the year, to simplify matters. I want to finish my new book before I move.”
Fred still looked uneasy. “I better see de insurance man, eh? It says for purposes of domestic dwelling.”
“He won’t object. Let’s have a look at your garden. What a fine crop of apples and sickle pears you have!”
“I don’t like dem trees what don’t bear not’ing,” said the old man with sly humour, remembering the Professor’s glistening, barren shrubs and the good ground wasted behind his stucco wall.
“How about your linden-trees?”
“Oh, dem flowers is awful good for de headache!”
“You don’t look as if you were subject to it, Fred.”
“Not me, but my woman always had.”
“Pretty lonesome without her, Appelhoff?”
“I miss her, Professor, but I ain’t just lonesome.” The old man rubbed his bristly chin. “My Minna here is most like a person, and den I got so many t’ings to t’ink about.”
“Have you? Pleasant things, I hope?”
“Well, all kinds. When I was young, in de old country, I had it hard to git my wife at all, an’ I never had time to t’ink. When I come to dis country I had to work so turrible hard on dat farm to make crops an’ pay debts, dat I was like a horse. Now I have it easy, an’ I take time to t’ink about all dem t’ings.”
St. Peter laughed. “We all come to it, Applehoff. That’s one thing I’m renting your house for, to have room to think. Good morning.”
Crossing the public park, on his way back to the old house, he espied his professional rival and enemy, Professor Horace Langtry, taking a Sunday morning stroll—very well got up in English clothes he had brought back from his customary summer in London, with a bowler hat of unusual block and a horn-handled walking-stick. In twenty years the two men had scarcely had speech with each other beyond a stiff “good morning.” When Langtry first came to the university he looked hardly more than a boy, with curly brown hair and such a fresh complexion that the students called him Lily Langtry. His round pink cheeks and round eyes and round chin made him look rather like a baby grown big. All these years had made little difference, except that his curls were now quite grey, his rosy cheeks even rosier, and his mouth dropped a little at the corners, so that he looked like a baby suddenly