Page:Henry B. Fuller - Bertram Cope's Year, 1919.djvu/266



first week in his new berth held him rather close, and Cope was able to move about with less need of accounting for his every hour. One of his first concerns was to get over his sitting with Hortense Dunton. His "sitting," he said: it was to be the first, the only and the last.

He came into her place with a show of confidence, a kind of blustery bonhomie. "I give you an hour from my treadmill," he declared brightly. "So many books, and such dry ones!"

Hortense, who had been moping, brightened too. "I thought you had forgotten me," she said chidingly. Yet her tone had less acerbity than that which she had employed, but a few moments before, to address him in his absence. For she often had in mind, at intervals longer or shorter, Cope's improvisation about the Sassafras—too truly that dense-minded shrub had. failed to understand the "young ladies" and their "needs."

"My thesis," he said. "From now on, it must take a lot of my thought and every moment of my spare time." He looked at the waiting canvas. "Clinch it to-day. Hurry it through."

He spoke with a factitious vivacity which almost