izing and quite unpractical eyes of his.
You see it in the thin, high-arched, bony nose (almost as fine a beak as
the one belonging to His Grace, the Duke of M----!) and you see it in
the sad and somewhat elongated face, as though he had pored over big
books too much, a sort of air of pathos and aloofness from things. His
mouth strikes you as being rather meager, until he smiles, which is
quite often, for, glory be, he has a good sense of humor. But besides
that he has a neatness, a coolness, an impersonal sort of ease, which
would make you think that he might have stepped out of one of Henry
James's earlier novels of about the time of the _Portrait of a Lady_.
And I like him. I knew that at once. He's _effete_ and old-worldish and
probably useless, out here, but he stands for something I've been
missing, and I'll be greatly mistaken if Percival Benson and Chaddie
McKail are not pretty good friends before the winter's over! He's asked
if he might be permitted to call, and he's coming for dinner to-morrow
night, and I do hope Dinky-Dunk is nice to him--if we're to be
neighbors. But Dinky-Dunk says Westerners don't ask to be permitted to
call. They just stick their cayuse into the corral and walk in, the same
as an Indian does. And Dinky-Dunk says that if he comes in evening dress
he'll shoot him, sure pop!

_Thursday the Twenty-ninth_

Percy (how I hate that name!) was here for dinner last night, and all
things considered, we didn't fare so badly. We had tomato bisque and
scalloped potatoes and prairie-chicken (they need to be well basted) and
hot biscuits and stewed dried peaches with cream. Then we had coffee and
the men smoked their pipes. We talked until a quarter to one in the
morning, and my poor Dinky-Dunk, who has been working so hard and seeing
nobody, really enjoyed that visit and really likes Percival Benson.

Percy got talking about Oxford, and you could see that he loved the old
town and that he felt more at home on the Isis than on the prairie. He
said he once heard Freeman tell a story about Goldwin Smith, who used to
be Regius Professor of History at the University. G. S. seemed
astonished that F. couldn't tell him, at some _viva voce_ exam,
whatever that may mean, the cause of King John's death. Then G. S.
explained that poor John died of too much peaches and fresh ale, "which
would give a man considerable belly-ache," the Regius Professor of
History solemnly announced to Freeman.

Percy said