“I’m sure he can’t be,” said Mrs. Ives, with the polite obviousness that was her social habit.
“Oh, yes—and he knows ever so much more about it. One of my school friends is Marion Bradley. Don’t you love her? She’s the brightest girl in school. She asked me to come and see you as soon as you got settled. Of course I should have done that anyway.”
Her friendly, observant eyes roved from one to another of her audience.
“Yes, you’re quite right about Marion; I love her,” said Mr. Dean. “These other people don’t know her well enough probably to have reached that stage as yet. Are you a Latin scholar like your father?”
“Oh, no; Marion always beats me. Marion always leads the class.”
She turned her attention to David and said she had heard that he came from St. Timothy’s, and asked him whether he knew Lawrence Bruce and John Murray; and David regretted now that he had not cultivated the acquaintance of those young fifth-formers. But she was not discouraged by his inability to claim intimacy with them—there were other subjects just as interesting—and she chatted about the incoming freshman class, of which she knew quite as much as David himself, and asked him what sports he meant to take part in and where he was to room and what courses he was to elect.
“Oh, tea!” she exclaimed in rapture when the waitress appeared with the tray. “We never have it at home.”
She displayed a hearty appetite, and that completed her conquest of Mrs. Ives. After she had returned through the garden gate, Mrs. Ives remarked that they had a very attractive neighbor, and Mr. Dean tried without much success to draw from David a description of the young girl’s looks.
As the days went by the gate in the hedge was often opened; the members of the two families came to be on easy-going, neighborly terms. Mr. Vance, a shock-headed, stoop-shouldered elderly widower with a scant regard for his personal appearance that caused his daughter both distress and amusement, was enchanted with Mr. Dean, his scholarship and his appreciation. Over the telephone he would frequently invite him to his study for an hour of conversation and would then present himself at Mrs. Ives’s door to act as guide. Mrs. Ives revered her new neighbor not only for the vast knowledge that had qualified him for the post of professor at Harvard University, but even more for the associations of his youth, which he sometimes recalled while she listened in rapt wonder. He had studied under Lowell and Longfellow, he had seen Emerson and Hawthorne, he had been in the audience that heard Lowell read the “Commemoration Ode,” and he had even dined at the Autocrat’s table. Mrs. Ives, who on her second day in Cambridge had audaciously plucked a tiny sprig of lilac from the hedge in front of Longfellow’s house and was preserving the treasure between the leaves of a dictionary, and who had stood that same day a worshipful pilgrim in the gateway in front of Lowell’s mansion, listened to her neighbor’s reminiscences and comments with mingled exultation and amazement, although she lost some of them owing to her habit of incredulously congratulating herself in the midst of his talk upon her extraordinary privilege.