Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/43

 literature. "Shades of Frank Harris!" he cried.

"If that isn't just like Arundel! Why, that man is pure and simple bourgeois! I never heard of such a thing. Has he no feeling at all for art?"

Pearl laughed—the pure, musical laugh of careless girlishness, but the recording angel caught in the nimble chords a faint overtone of something else—like the tinkle of ice in a misty tumbler. "Oh, he has his own ideas about art," she said. "He's taken to writing poetry himself. You never heard such stuff—I've been meaning to tell you. What does 'pullulate' mean?"

Lester's valiant heart, Lester's manly hands that had acted as a muff on a Riverside Drive bus, trembled and stiffened. "It pullulates and blooms in sultry rhyme," she quoted gayly. "Now what do you make of that, as referring to Mr. Arundel's heart? Sultry is right, too!"

Lion-hearted Harvard, oak-bosomed Balliol, and all the mature essences of manhood were needed to keep Lester calm. How had she seen these secret strains? She must have been peeping into the chief's private correspondence. He hesitated during six inches of spaghetti. "Search me!" he said. "Is it in Walter Mason?"

"No, it's his own stuff, I tell you. "O beauteous rose! O shrub without a thorn!" she chanted, and