sequence. The extra man gave just that little touch of negligence which so distinguished a gathering needed. It was as perfect as Elsie could make it.

I turned to my neighbor in black. The lorgnette was down now in her lap. Her bare eyes were peering at the melon in front of her. When I made some comment on the people, she merely lifted her glasses and looked at the people thoroughly. She had beautiful brown eyes. They were incapable doubtless, as the uncle in Toledo remembered, but perhaps it was just this incapacity that made them so tremendously appealing. They were the prettiest eyes at the table, I thought, and I had a sudden desire to tell her so, I was so sure it was such a long time since Professor Jenkins had. It is one of my few philanthropic instincts. If I had to go around doing good, which God forbid, I should choose the job of paying compliments to women like Mrs. Jenkins. And I should make an awful mess of it too, if my experience with her should be typical.

"They make me feel so small," she had said, ending her scrutiny.

"They shouldn't," I replied; "you have the prettiest eyes and the most distinguished husband at the table."

She went on with her melon in silence. I thought I was snubbed and then she said quietly: "Even if it's true it doesn't do either of us much good. I can hardly see out of the eyes, and Tom . . ́. ” She paused. "Yes," I urged. "And Tom! What about Tom?"

"Poor Tom," she said softly-so softly that I was not sure I was meant to hear. I thought it better to look at Tom intently. I did not remember him, but I had no difficulty in identifying the figure of the savant with the shabby little figure of the undergraduate who used to climb our staircase to the very topmost room. Elsie was being very attentive to him at that moment, and he reminded me somehow of a conscientious missionary being wooed by a cannibal princess. His collar was a great deal too large for him and inside it I could see his throat contracting and enlarging as if a great pulse-beat in it and his head nodded time to his hostess's observations.

"You are a great friend of Mr. Paley's, aren't you?" asked the little woman in black.

"That," I explained, "is my only reason for being here."

She put up her glasses and stared in her soft kind way at the silver centrepiece. "I used to hate him," she said suddenly. "But," I exclaimed, "I never knew you knew him before."

"Know him," she repeated, "I have known him ever since his freshman year. I used to know the color of the socks he wore, the kind of cigarettes he smoked, the way he brushed his hair."

She went through the catalogue with her eyes still fixed on the centrepiece. When she had finished, and it was a good deal longer catalogue than this, she brought her eyes back to me and added gravely, "Poor Tom."

"I see," I answered.

I did see. I had even caught a glimpse of part of it before-his part of it-the little figure on the staircase. I had never an inkling of the other figure in Wakefield, Mississippi. I wondered, as I looked at her, how those eyes looked when they read the letters full of socks and cigarettes and the rest of the catalogue. When she glanced down the table at her host a moment I watched them and they were not-no, distinctly they were not-so altogether gentle as I had seen them. For the first time in my life a woman's eyes turned more softly to me than to Roger Paley.

I stifled my gratification with an aphorism, "None of us," I observed safely, "can have everything."

"No," she agreed, as I expected. She paused. Then she added, as I certainly did not expect: "But some of us can seem to."

The more I think of it, the more certain I become that just there she touched the heart of the matter. The true pathos of Tom Jenkins's fate was an invincible sincerity. He could never, however ardently he might aspire, appear other than what he was. A fair day's wage, in the economist's phrase, for a fair day's work, would probably always be his-an adequately filled pay envelope at the end of the week, but no sweetly unexpected dividends, no luscious unearned increment.

When she had pointed it out, this destiny seemed visibly stamped upon him in that company. Two feet away sat one of the richest trustees in the world, Fortescue Lloyd, with his nobly filled shirt front, his immaculate skin, his pure white hair and mustache and eyebrows which seventy years of stiff brushing had moulded to the consistency of fine wax, with his string of honorary degrees and directorships and presidencies-what a magnificent philanthropic old brigand he was, how gloriously he had looted life!

But the little black witch at my side waved her broomstick, and the immoral vision passed. "It really doesn't matter," she was saying, "except with the boys." She had turned away to struggle with an immense fish the servant had thrust under her elbow.

"You mean his classes?" I asked. She was silent, absorbed in her struggle, striving to draw out Leviathan with a spoon.

"They give him a great deal of trouble," she explained presently.

I supposed they would; I have long believed that turning over men of thought as teachers to boys was the last survival of the gladiatorial games.

"He simply can't manage them," she said severely.

"It's more difficult," I explained, "to -to just seem to boys."

"Is it?" she appeared doubtful. "I don't know; mine are all girls. And I am very glad of it."

I hastily agreed: "I loathe boys."
"Beasts!"

The word seemed to form on her lips and float out, a soft butterfly of sound, by itself over the table. It seemed to touch with strange emphasis the foreign ear of Dr. Mielle.

"Be-yeasts," he repeated vaguely, "What is it a be-yeasts?"

Mrs. Jenkins bowed her head over her plate, so I answered for her.

"Boys," I explained.

"Une espèce d'animal," translated the fluent Mrs. McCarter, and the savant's eyeglasses glittered as he bowed his head again before her fluency.

"I didn't know they were listening," whispered Mrs. Jenkins.

"They aren't any more," I assured her.

"It might be serious, you know," she explained, "if the president heard-. They are so particular about it-discipline, influence." She raised her eyes frankly to mine, and her voice rose too, "it's his weakness, you see-Tom'sinfluence, discipline. He hasn't any." "What does it matter," I argued, "if he has everything else?"

She sighed. "That's just the way Tom talks," she said.

Strangely I did not feel flattered by the comparison as she made it.

"Now he," she said, and, though she did not stir a finger, the pronoun struck Roger Paley as unmistakably as if she had thrown a potato at him. "Now he would do all that so splendidly."

I was silent. I was quite as ready to throw Paley to the wolves for her as Paley was to do so to me for that perfectly commonplace woman he married, but I didn't care to betray him at his own dinnertable. So I was silent.

"And yet," continued Mrs. Jenkins serenely, "he couldn't even graduate." "Oh," I interrupted.

"No," she insisted, "He never really got any degree."

When I met her glance I knew better than to insist. Instead I asked, "Tell me about it."

Ten days later I retold her story at the alumni luncheon, but I did not tell all of it. I only repeated the scandalous part of it. That audience was not fit to hear it all. It was an immense gathering in the university gymnasium and a great part of that dinner company was there: The president and the same two trustees, and Roger and Professor Mielle, the guest of honor on both occasions; and when I finished there was a roar of applause that made even the undergraduates outside jealous for their favorite sport. But when she told it there was at the end only a soft rustle of murmur from chairs and skirts, for the telling lasted from that big fish to the end of the ices. "We weren't engaged until later," she began.

I nodded.

times shows me places he still remembers being lonely in. He had a room very high up in one of the older dormitories, over Mr. Paley's, and he told me he used to like to sit at the window there just because he could see the railroad tracks that led back home."

What a splendid audience she had! How much better than mine I could remember that dormitory. I could remember those rails, though I had never looked at them very much.

"Later," she went on, "things were a little better. But it happened just at the end of them. Tom, you know, was awfully poor. His people in Wakefield were even poorer than mine. His father was a minister and awfully strict. And I don't suppose Tom could afford much fun even if you all had asked him to-so he just went around by himself and studied terribly hard."

I could have told her all of this as well as she told it to me, and she seemed suddenly to remember this because she said: "probably you know all this, anyway." "A little," I had to admit.

She frowned and looked away and just for an instant her glance rested on Paley. "It was then, I suppose," she went on, "he got so silly about your friend Mr. Paley. He was captain of something or other, wasn't he?"

"He was about everything," I said, "that we all wanted to be then.'

"Well, Tom thought he was, anyway. I suppose you all despised him and I don't blame you. I even did myself, though I understood it better. He had always been an awfully lonely boy. His father was so strict with him. There wasn't very much to do in Wakefield, but what little there was Tom did less than anybody else. So when he got up there among all those strangers I suppose he just naturally took a back seat."

Quite unconsciously she had drifted back in her narrative to Mississippi, I could see. It was "up there" and "among all those strangers," though she had lived up there among them now more than half her life. It is the first half as well as the first step that costs. There was even a dash of her old accent when she spoke of Roger.

"I suppose maybe I was jealous of him.

Almost anybody would have been in my place. And I used to hate him. I don't any more. I don't admiah Mr. Paley, but I don't dislike him."

"You might even admire him," I ventured, "if you knew him better."

"Maybe," she answered; "certainly Tom did. He wrote more about him than anything else. And I have always thought maybe it was the only thing Tom wasn't quite truthful about-I mean seeing a good deal of him. Did he?"

"Oh, yes," I answered, "they used to see each other nearly every day at one time, I imagine."

"Where?" she asked.

"Oh, just around," I answered.

"Perhaps," was her reply but I knew from the word that I had wasted breath. For the first time I saw her look across the table at her husband. It was not a particularly tender glance. "Sometimes," she said, "when I think of his doing it I could shake him."

I was not the only one who detected that glance. Fortescue Lloyd, who rarely missed anything that was close to him, nodded to her with a laugh. "Why didn't you shake him, then, Mrs. Jenkins?" he called out. "That is what I am always urging, you know, shaking up these great scientists. That's my métier."

The little woman in black actually quivered. I thought for an instant she would collapse quite into stammering embarrassment at so direct a shot from so great a gun. I imagine it was the most public moment of her life. Never before had so direct a beam from so great a light fallen upon her. And at the signal every other countenance at the table turned upon her too. She was centred as fairly by the whole cluster as any prima donna of comic opera in the first act. Our whispered tête-à-tête was thus suddenly lifted up into a great dramatic dialogue. It was a close thing. For a moment I thought the wedding present of the uncle in Toledo was snapped, she grasped it so in both hands. Then she rose fairly steadily, evenly to the levels of her occasion.

"Shall I, Tom?" she asked.

By Jove, she was the prima donna of that table. And it was her first actthe first of all her life. Nobody heard

"By Jove," he cried, "that was the finest piece of nerve I ever heard of."-Page 252.