Page:Henry B. Fuller - Bertram Cope's Year, 1919.djvu/164

 crowned by an ornamental open-work iron pyramid for wireless, and the segregated group of theological dormitories through whose windows earnest ringing young voices were sometimes heard at the practice of sermon-delivery, and the men's club where the billiard tables were doubtless decorously covered with their customary Sunday sheets of black oilcloth, and took intuitively the path which led along the edge of the bluff. Beyond them, further bluffs and a few low headlands; here a lighthouse, there a water-tower; elsewhere (and not so far) the balconied roof of the lifesaving station, where the boats, light and heavy, were manned by muscular students: their vigilance and activity, interspersed with long periods of leisure or of absence, helped them to "pay their way." Out toward the horizon a passenger steamer en route to some port farther north, or a long ore-freighter, singularly uneventful between bow and far-distant afterhouse, on its way down from the iron-ranges of Superior.

The path was narrow, but Cope, unexpectedly to himself, had no complaint to make. Really, the girl did better here, somehow, than lots of other girls would have done on a wide sidewalk. Most of them walked too close to you, or too far from you, altering the interval suddenly and arbitrarily, and tending to bump against you when you didn't expect it and didn't want it. They were uncertain at crossings; if it was necessary for them to take your arm, as it sometimes became, in the evening, on a crowded street, why, they were too gingerly or else pressed too close; and if it happened to rain, you sometimes had to take a cab,