Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/57

 like those once beheld in cemetery plots; she had hung up two Japanese lanterns—they were ragged and they hung crooked. She spoke with scorn of the other inhabitants of the apartment-house, who were "so prosaic, so conventional, that they never came up to this darling hidey-place." She compared her refuge to the roof of a Moorish palace, to a Spanish patio, to a Japanese garden, to a "pleasaunce of old Provençal." But to Martin it seemed a good deal like a plain roof. He was vaguely ready for a quarrel, that April evening when he called on Madeline and her mother sniffily told him that she was to be found on the roof.

"Damned Japanese lanterns. Rather look at liver-sections," he grumbled, as he trudged up the curving stairs.

Madeline was sitting on the funereal iron bench, her chin in her hands. For once she did not greet him with flowery excitement but with a noncommittal "Hello." She seemed spiritless. He felt guilty for his scoffing; he suddenly saw the pathos in her pretense that this stretch of tar-paper and slatted walks was a blazing garden. As he sat beside her he piped, "Say, that's a dandy new strip of matting you've put down."

"It is not! It's mangy!" She turned toward him. She wailed, "Oh, Mart, I'm so sick of myself, to-night. I'm always trying to make people think I'm somebody. I'm not. I'm a bluff."

"What is it, dear?"

"Oh, it's lots. Dr. Brumfit, hang him—only he was right—he as good as told me that if I don't work harder I'll have to get out of the graduate school. I'm not doing a thing, he said, and if I don't have my Ph.D., then I won't be able to land a nice job teaching English in some swell school, and I'd better land one, too, because it doesn't look to poor Madeline as if anybody was going to marry her."

His arm about her, he blared, "I know exactly who—"

"No, I'm not fishing. I'm almost honest, to-night. I'm no good, Mart. I tell people how clever I am. And I don't suppose they believe it. Probably they go off and laugh at me!"

"They do not! If they did— I'd like to see anybody that tried laughing—"

"It's awfully sweet and dear of you, but I'm not worth it. The poetic Madeline! With her ree-fined vocabulary! I'm a—I'm a—Martin, I'm a tin-horn sport! I'm everything your friend Clif thinks I am. Oh, you needn't tell me. I know