"Well, who is there?" persisted Bennie.
Thornton leaned back meditatively.
"I suggest your trying the research professor of applied mathematics at the new National Institute."
"Thanks," answered his friend, slipping his note-book back into his pocket and putting on his hat. "By the way, what's the gent's name?"
Thornton's eye twinkled.
"His name," he said, "is Miss Rhoda Gibbs."
IV
Professor Bennie Hooker arose next morning and got on line in company with Mrs. Mullins' other boarders for his bath in the tin tub just as usual. But something was different. Breakfast, while no stodgier than usual, did not taste quite the same, and he answered Miss Parkinson, the spinster who roomed beneath him, quite sharply that he wasn't responsible for the milk or for the maple sirup either, although, in his absent-mindedness, he had appropriated considerably more than his share of both. The fact of the matter was that Thornton had told him to go to a woman for assistance—a woman!
It was now upward of thirty years since there had been a woman in Bennie's life—leaving out, of course, Miss Beebe, his landlady in Cambridge, and Bridget McGee, the biddy who cleaned his room in the house on the Appian Way, where Miss Beebe resided. He had never liked women, anyway—not since they had insisted on swathing him as a child in flannel soaked in various kinds of healing oils, and his experience with Miss Beebe and the McGee had not increased his regard. They were fools—or just scrawny fakers, aping intelligence like Miss Beebe, who filled him with disgust. Yet, had he known it, that withered virgin adored the ground upon which Bennie's carpet slippers trod, and she had not raised the rent on him for eighteen years. Such are life's tragedies. And now to be sent to one of the despised sex to crave succor, to beg for aid, humbly to be shown how to solve a not extraordinarily difficult problem in astronomical mathematics—it simply made him sick. He wouldn't go to her—he simply wouldn't!