Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/28

 tributions were an aspect of tidy chaos, an odor of cigarette smoke, a rented piano, a host of books that were overdue at the library, a bunch of pink daisies, and a terra cotta head of Voltaire who was mistaken for Mozart and Wagner. On the work table reposed a typewriter whose carriage moved neither to the right nor to the left, also a bag of apples and two photographs: one of the Professor Thanet, in a gentle bowler and fierce mustachios, and one of his widow, in bangs and leg of mutton sleeves, looking sad, Grover had reflected, even twenty-odd years ago. He would confront her with the photograph the next time she said, "Darling, do you want to break your mother's heart?" She had been born with such a breakable one.

The work table bore that title only as a matter of courtesy: Grover preferred his knees. With slippered feet braced against the and a textbook balanced on his thighs, he spent hours in sharpening pencils, peeling apples, and drawing pictures of knights-at-arms and highborn ladies leaning out of bowers. A somewhat higher degree of concentration produced long letters to Geoffrey Saint, former tutor and perennial mentor. Occasionally he read a prescribed chapter in history or wrote a prescribed theme, and quite often he had spent a whole night absorbed in irrelevant mental exploration in smuggled volumes of Casanova or Krafft-Ebbing.

Today his heart was heavy and his conscience importunate. He had let more than a month go by with-