Bertram Cope's Year Part 2

Cope's first call was made, not on a tempestuous evening in the winter time, but on a quiet Sunday afternoon toward the end of September. The day was sunny and the streets were full of strollers moving along decorously beneath the elms, maples and catalpas.

"Drop in some Sunday about five," Medora Phillips had said to him, "and have tea. The girls will be glad to meet you."

"The girls"? Who were they, and how many? He supposed he could account for one of them, at least; but the others?

"You find me alone, after all," was her greeting. "The girls are out walking--with each other, or their beaux, or whatever. Come in here."

She led him into a s.p.a.cious room cluttered with lambrequins, stringy portieres, grilles, scroll-work, bric-a-brac....

"The fine weather has been too much for them," she proceeded. "I was relying on them to entertain you."

"Dear me! Am I to be entertained?"

"Of course you are." Her expression and inflection indicated to him that he had been caught up in the cogs of a sizable machine, and that he was to be put through it. Everybody who came was entertained--or helped entertain others. Entertainment, in fact, was the one object of the establishment.

"Well, can't you entertain me yourself?"

"Perhaps I can." And it almost seemed as if he had been secured and isolated for the express purpose of undergoing a particular course of treatment.

"----in the interval," she amended. "They'll be back by sunset. They're clever girls and I know you'll enjoy them."

She uttered this belief emphatically--so emphatically, in truth, that it came to mean: "I wonder if you will indeed." And there was even an overtone: "After all, it's not the least necessary that you should."

"I suppose I have met one of them already."

"You have met Amy. But there are Hortense and Carolyn."

"What can they all be?" He wondered to himself: "daughters, nieces, cousins, co-eds, boarders...?"

"Amy plays. Hortense paints. Carolyn is a poet."

"Amy plays? Pardon me for calling her Amy, but you have never given me the rest of her name."

"I certainly presented you."

"To 'Amy'."

"Well, that was careless, if true. Her name is Amy Leffingwell; and Hortense's name is----"

"Stop, please. Pay it out gradually. My poor head can hold only what it can. Names without people to attach them to...."

"The people will be here presently," Medora Phillips said, rather shortly. Surely this young man was taking his own tone. It was not quite the tone usually taken by college boys on their first call. Her position and her imposing surroundings--yes, her kindliness in noticing him at all--might surely save her from informalities that almost shaped into impertinences. Yet, on the other hand, nothing bored one more than a young man who openly showed himself intimidated. What was there behind this one? More than she had thought? Well, if so, none the worse. Time might tell.

"So Miss Leffingwell plays?" He flared out his blue-white smile. "Let me learn my lesson page by page."

"Yes, she plays," returned Medora Phillips briefly. "Guess what," she continued presently, half placated.

They were again side by side on a sofa, each with an elbow on its back and the elbows near together. Nor was Medora Phillips, though plump, at all the graceless, dumpy little body she sometimes taxed herself with being.

"What? Oh, piano, I suppose."

"Piano!"

"What's wrong?"

"The piano is common: it's a.s.sumed."

"Oh, she performs on something unusual? Xylophone?"

"Be serious."

"Trombone? I've seen wonders done on that in a 'lady orchestra'."

"Don't be grotesque." She drew her dark eyebrows into protest. "What a sight!--a delicate young girl playing a trombone!"

"Well, then,--a harp. That's sometimes a pleasant sight."

"A harp needs an express wagon. Though of course it is pretty for the arms."

"Arms? Let me see. The violin?"

"Of course. And that's probably the very first thing you thought of.

Why not have mentioned it?"

"I suppose I've been taught the duty of making conversation."

"The duty? Not the pleasure?"

"That remains to be...." He paused. "So she has arms," he pretended to muse. "I confess I hadn't quite noticed."

"She pa.s.sed you a cup of tea, didn't she?"

"Oh, surely. And a sandwich. And another. And a slice of layer cake, with a fork. And another cup of tea. And a macaroon or two----"

"Am I a glutton?"

"Am I? Some of all that provender was for me, as I recall."

They were still side by side on the sofa. Both were cross--kneed, and the tip of her russet boot almost grazed that of his Oxford tie. He did not notice: he was already arranging the first paragraph of a letter to a friend in Winnebago, Wisconsin. "Dear Arthur: I called,--as I said I was going to. She is a sc.r.a.pper. She goes at you hammer and tongs--pretending to quarrel as a means of entertaining you..."

Medora Phillips removed her elbow from the back of the sofa, and began to prod up her cushions. "How about your work?" she asked. "What are you doing?"

He came back. "Oh, I'm boning. Some things still to make up. I'm digging in the poetry of Gower--the 'moral Gower'."

"Well, I see no reason why poetry shouldn't be moral. Has he been publishing anything lately that I ought to see?"

"Not--lately."