"In the eye of the what?" asked Paley. "The Supreme Intellect," I repeated. "Good Lord," said Paley, "Now you've got me all balled up. I meant ant as a sort of compliment.'

"You should be more careful about your flattery," I warned him, "when you talk of men of genius."

He had got up, at a signal from a waiter, and stood looking down at mevery far down. "You are awfully personal about men of genius to-day. Supreme Intellects! You haven't started any particular brain waves yourself, have you, recently? What do you want me to do with the fellow? Go down there and black his boots or kiss him, or something!"

"You might," I suggested, "invite him up here to dinner."

"Really?" He stood looking down at me with his thumbs in his waistcoat pock

ets.

I nodded.

"Why he probably wouldn't even remember who I am," he objected.

Remember him! I remembered Jenkins, the shabby, timid little figure climbing past our door on that old college staircase, up, up to his own room at the very topmost height. I remembered the quivering eagerness, the sudden illumination of that sad little face when, as I saw happen once or twice, it had a nod to respond to from that other, that swift gaily clad triumphant figure bounding up or down that same staircase. Roger Paley will always have a certain radiance about him, no humanly possible number of years will ever quite dim it, but he will never again shine with the same pure effulgence of those years. Perhaps it is only the hot breath of youth, breathed forth in heroworship, that can kindle it. Later, cooler, more judicial approbation can't blow any metal to such incandescence.

"Forget you!" I cried to Roger Paley in Piatt's little front room that aforetime was the bar; "he'll forget his atoms first." Perhaps I was so sure because I had not been entirely unlike Thomas W. Jenkins in those days. Even then I looked upon Roger Paley with a sort of pride. After all there is something in wearing one's virtues easily. Roger's may not have been rare or difficult of acquirement,

but as they were they sat upon him as gracefully as antlers on a stag.

"If you mean it," he said, "I'll do it." Piatt's little front room has in its very darkest corner a writing-table. In fact it is officially a writing-room. I pointed to the almost invisible desk.

"But what are you going to call him?” I asked.

"What did we use to call him?" said Roger.

The truth slowly dawned that we had never called him anything.

"Lived in the same entry with him for years, in the same class, in the same college," Roger recounted slowly, "and never spoke to him. Oh damn, weren't we little rotters!"

"How about Tommy?" I suggested. "Punk," said Roger, "what about Jenks?"

Beneath contempt I thought it. Then Paley suffered what he is fond of describing as a brain wave. His pen scratched paper. "I'll call him," he announced, "Professor.' But," he added over his shoulder, "quotation marks. Do you see?"

It seemed only a casual proceeding, the despatching of that letter from Piatt's little front room, one time the bar. In reality it was a ceremony. I did not recognize this at the time. True ceremonies are generally difficult to recognize; that's why they have to be emphasized so much. This not being emphasized at all, I missed its significance completely, failed quite to see that it was the christening of Thomas W. Jenkins by Roger, the establishing of one of the most mystic and powerful relations between the Vanity of Man and the Diversity of Things. To be sure, Paley did not invent Thomas W. or even discover him, but he named him. So Vespucius was probably the hottest one hundred per center of us all-far more than Columbus, who seems always to have been slightly pro-Indian. So doubtless many of Thomas W. Jenkins's fellows feel in their hearts for some fragment of the world's foundations. So baptism meets us at the threshold of all cults and creeds and mysteries. And so when Paley wrote down "Professor" in quotationmarks he assumed a sort of inward and spiritual guardianship for that eminent

scientist that lives in his honest heart even to this day.

"See," he pointed out gleefully when he showed me the answer, "I hit the bullseye." The letter was signed "sincerely your old classmate the Professor."

"Pretty good, don't you think?" he asked.

"Splendid," I agreed. Paley had come to my office and was wasting what I endeavored to believe was my valuable time.

He sat down on the corner of the desk and put his feet on my chair-arm. To Paley no time was valuable.

"But why does he talk about academic duties?" he asked doubtfully. The Professor had regretted that just at that time his academic duties kept him at home. "Isn't that sort of laying it on a bit thick, don't you think?"

I thought it was not. I told him that to the mind of Professor Jenkins, academic duties were not distinctions. American universities, I explained, in my editorial manner, were still unfortunately subject to the needs and perversities of boys. In time, it was fondly believed, we might have universities without any boys in them. But that Elysian state was still in the future and meantime great scholars were still degraded by examinations and the punishment of sophomores for sticking pins in one another's trousers. Such were the Professor's academic duties; and certainly there was no laying it on thick in referring to them, was there? Paley dropped his feet and agreed there was not, that it seemed to him more or less of a damn shame. "We will have to get hold of him later," he said firmly, and the baptismal spirit sounded in his voice as he said it.

It was there I first noticed it, and was a little alarmed. Paley is difficult to stop. He was called the greatest halfback of a decade, and it is the supreme virtue of a halfback to be difficult to stop. So I spoke to Elsie, Roger's wife, about it. I found her enthusiastic. Oh yes, she hoped that Roger would do it. She said the association was what he needed. It was speeches like that which illuminated the vast extent of Elsie's happiness.

"Good for whom?" I asked.

"For Roger, of course," she answered.

That had not been my idea at all, but I thought it best not to say so. In fact, like most meddlers, I was only too glad to get out of the affair by that time. Let her have my place and be grateful.

As a matter of fact she would have pushed me out, anyway. I verily believe she would not even have asked me to what was properly my own dinner. I recognized that only on the night of the third of June, when the dinner did, after two postponements, finally take place, and I found that I was assigned to Mrs. Thomas W. Jenkins.

Mrs. Jenkins wore black and it was the third of June and hot for that date. In addition she carried a lorgnette, a thing no woman can manage successfully on less than fifty thousand a year. She lifted the thing to her nose when I was introduced and said calmly, "You are the only person in the room I never heard of."

"Really?" said Elsie, with delight. "Why, he's a newspaper reporter and a great friend of Roger's."

I braced up to meet the glasses, confident of their fundamental sham, and met, flowing softly through them, the kindest, simplest glance any mortal ever encountered through so horrid an aperture. I instantly decided the lorgnette was a wedding present. Later in the evening, when we had become confidential, she told me the guess was correct. She had been married in Wakefield, Mississippi, where she and her husband had been born, and the glasses had been the graceful tribute from an uncle in Toledo, who apparently remembered nothing of the niece except that she was sighted. But by that time I would have forgiven her even if she had bought the machine expressly to look at me with.

near

The others, the ones whom Mrs. Jenkins had heard of, were solid proof of Elsie's authority: the president of the university, with that air of bland dignity all American presidents of things assume; two of the trustees, whose wives could have worn any number of lorgnettes but forbore; Professor Mielle, who had just crossed the Atlantic Ocean carrying Tom Jenkins's new ribbon, and a Mrs. McCarter, who was put next him because she once got a divorce in Paris and was supposed to speak French fluently in con