vial expeditions to Mayfield were over, "because _she_ wouldn't
understand" (most conclusive proof!), but he ended by taking it as he
might have taken an inequality of temper--as a flaw in character to be
overlooked in a friend. Then again, Pellams found it positively uncanny
to be getting on so well in his work, an uneasy feeling as though he
were walking along the edge of a steep place. As for the joke itself, he
could laugh over it with Katharine, but there was no way to spring it. A
josh that has not a public end lacks art. He realized that the idea had
seemed very rich when he conceived it and that he had plunged into it
without considering its finish, and of course an impractical girl
wouldn't look so far ahead. Now, he saw that it had ceased to be a josh
at all, where other people were concerned.

When he came to the thought of dropping it, he suspected that it was no
longer a josh where he himself was concerned. The realization of this
quite stunned him, the afternoon it came to him. They were sitting below
the Sphinx, at the back of the Mausoleum, and the quail were calling
among the pines. Katharine was reading to him from one of his
text-books. He heard very little of what she read. To him the book kept
repeating that she had the most attractive mouth and chin he had ever
noticed; that the low-drawn hair on her forehead was made to be smoothed
back, very gently, from her clear skin. The consciousness that he could
not give up these study-afternoons came over him with a stab, and told
him that he had not been listening at all well lately; that this was why
he could not remember the stuff in recitation and why he had not dared
to tell her his recent marks. She trusted him so thoroughly now that she
did not stop him so often when he talked, instead of working. If she had
guessed the real reason of his laziness, she would have been honestly
disappointed in him. This was the tragedy of it. He could never let her
suspect that he was not still fooling the Rho house. She was a girl
entirely without sentimentality--this was what he liked in her at first,
and now it was his overthrow. If she should so much as dream that his
feeling toward her was anything more than the friendship he had outlined
in the beginning, she would shut her book with a slap and declare the
compact at an end. He must keep on acting, only his audience had changed
and the people he had been joking with were now behind the scenes,
though they didn't