Page:Henry B. Fuller - Bertram Cope's Year, 1919.djvu/54

 said. It gets tiresome, hearing all those girls slithering and chattering through the halls." He put his bony hands back on the rims of his wheels. "Where have you been all this time?"

"Oh, you know I come when I can." Randolph ran his eye over the walls of the big empty room. The pictures were all in place—landscapes, figure-pieces, what not; everything as familiar as the form of words he had just employed to meet an oft-repeated query implying indifference and neglect.

"How is it outside? I haven't been down on the street for a month."

"Oh, things are bright and pleasant enough." Through the wide window there appeared, half a mile away, the square twin towers of the University library, reminiscent of Oxford and Ely. Round them lesser towers and gables, scholastic in their gray stone, rose above the trees of the campus. Beyond all these a level line of watery blue ran for miles and provided an eventless horizon. A bright and pleasant enough sight indeed, but nothing for Joe Foster.

"Well, let me by," he said, "and we'll get along to my own room." The resonant bigness of the "gallery" was far removed from the intimate and the sociable.

To the side of this bare place, with its canvases which had become rather démodé—or at least had long ceased to interest—lay two bed-chambers: Foster's own, and one adjoining, which was classed as a spare room. It was sometimes given over to visiting luminaries of lesser magnitudes. Real celebrities—those of