Page:Henry B. Fuller - Bertram Cope's Year, 1919.djvu/17

 smile which seamed to say, "I'm old enough to do as I please." Her brusque informality was expected to carry itself off—and much else besides. "Of course I simply can't be half so intrepid as I seem!" it said. "Everybody about us understands that, and I must ask your recognition too for an ascertained fact."

"Known me?" returned Cope, promptly enough. "Why, you haven't known me because I haven't been here to be known." He spoke in a ringing, resonant voice, returning her unabashed pressure with a hearty good will and blazing down upon her through his clear blue eyes with a high degree of self-possession, even of insouciance. And he explained, with a liberal exhibition of perfect teeth, that for the two years following his graduation he had been teaching literature at a small college in Wisconsin and that he had lately come back to Alma Mater for another bout: "I'm after that degree," he concluded.

"Haven't been here?" she returned. "But you have been here; you must have been here for years—for four, anyhow. So why haven't we ?" she began again.

"Here as an undergraduate, yes," he acknowledged. "Unregarded dust. Dirt beneath your feet. In rainy weather, mud."

"Mud!" echoed Medora Phillips loudly, with an increased pressure on his long, narrow hand. "Why, Babylon was built of mud—of mud bricks, anyway. And the Hanging Gardens !" She still clung, looking up his slopes terrace by terrace.

Cope kept his self-possession and smiled brilliantly.