rocking-chair he brought for her and leaned back in it
without speaking. Her maroon-colored evening gown suggested that whoever
planned it had been somewhat straitened by economy, but it did well by
her rich complexion and creditable figure. Her features were creditable
too, the dark hair a little too heavy, perhaps, and the expression,
defined as it is apt to be when one is thirty-five, not wholly
satisfying. In truth, the countenance, like the gown, suffered a little
from economy, a sparseness of the things one loves best in a woman's
face. Half the sensitiveness belonging to her husband's eyes and mouth
would have made her beautiful.

"It is a pity the Barkers have such a bad night for their party," Cowart
said.

"The reception is at the Fieldings';" and again he felt himself rebuked.

"I'm afraid I didn't think much about the matter after you told me the
Dillinghams were coming by for you in their carriage. Fortunately
neither family holds us college people to very strict social account."

"They have their virtues, even if they are so vulgar as to be rich."

"Why, I believe I had just been thinking, before you came in, that it is
only the rich who have any virtues at all." He managed to speak
genially, but the consciousness that she was waiting for him to make
conversation, as she had waited for the chair, stiffened upon him like
frost.

He cast about for something to say, but the one interest which he would
have preferred to keep to himself was all that presented itself to his
grasp. "I have often thought," he suggested, "that if only we were in
sight of the Gulf, our landscape in early summer might not be very
unlike that of ancient Greece." She looked at him a little blankly, and
he drew one of his books nearer and began turning its leaves.

"I thought you were correcting your mathematics papers."

"I am, or have been; but I am reading Theocritus, too."

"Well, I don't see anything in a day like this to make anybody think of
summer. The dampness goes to your very marrow."

"It isn't the day; it's the poetry. That's the good of there being
poetry."

She skipped his parenthesis. "And you keep this room as cold as a
vault." Not faultfinding, but a somewhat irritating concern for his
comfort was in the complaint.

She went to the hearth and in her efficient way shook down the ashes
from the grate and heaped it with coal. A cabinet photograph of a girl
in her early teens, which had the appearance of havi