Page:Earl Derr Biggers - Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913).djvu/72

56 Why is he here? Yes, that is the question that disturbs you. What has brought this domesti cated college professor scampering from the Pa gan Renaissance to Baldpate Inn? For answer, I must ask you to go back with me a week's time, and gaze at a picture from the rather dreary aca demic kaleidoscope that is my life. "I am seated back of a desk on a platform in a bare yellow room. In front of me, tier on tier, sit a hundred young men in various attitudes 0f inattention. I am trying to tell them something of the ideal poetry that marked the rebirth of the Saxon genius. They are bored. I—well, gentle men, in confidence, even the mind of a college pro fessor has been known to wander at times from the subject in hand. And then—I begin to read a poem—a poem descriptive pf a woman dead six hundred years and more. Ah, gentlemen—"

He sat erect on the edge of his great chair. Back of the thick lenses of his spectacles he had eyes that still could flash.

This is not an era of romance," he said. "Our people grub in the dirt for the dollar. Their vis ions perish. Their souls grow stale. Yet, now