Mauney sat back in his chair and smiled. There was a flush of comfort in his face and a new relaxation. He liked the place, although he was still overcome, almost exhausted, by the swift changes of the day. Especially did he like Maxwell Lee, this comforting fellow with visionary dark eyes who sat opposite him now, smoking meditatively as if quite aware of the epoch-making significance of a simple railway journey; as if he realized how great an event it had really been to Mauney’s inexperienced soul.
CHAPTER II.
Mauney Prepares for College.
“I consider it most becoming and most civilized to mingle severity with good fellowship, so that the former may not grow into melancholy, nor the latter into frivolity.”—Pliny the Younger, Ep. Bk. 8.
When he awoke in the morning, he was vaguely conscious of some one talking in the room. Over the edge of his counterpane his eye caught the pyjama-ed figure of Lee, shaving in front of the dressing-case mirror, and he soon realized that Lee was talking to him.
“—thinking it over,” Lee was saying. “And I believe your best stunt is to look up a tutor who will give you your matriculation work extra-murally. That won’t tie you down to any formality of going to a high school. You can work as hard as you like, and, at your age, you’ll clean up that preliminary dope just like ice-cream.”
Mauney sprang out of bed and shaved. He fell in with Lee’s suggestion and decided that he would look up a tutor that very morning. He was thrilled with excitement and happiness. Outside the windows, rain was splashing on the sills, but it was the merriest, gladdest rain he had ever listened to. Before him stretched the great adventure of education, rich in its promise of compensation for all the years of miserable waiting. In fact, could it be quite true that he was actually conscious? Was he not rather treading the air of a delightful dream, from which, at any moment, he would awake to bleak realities?
There were only three at the breakfast table when they descended—Mrs. Manton, seated at the end in a rich dressing gown of yellow silk, and Jolvin, with Stalton, at one side. The Englishman, fully dressed as for business, ate in dignified silence. Stalton, whom to know was to love, sat in his shirt sleeves without a collar, as if he had no other business in life than to act in the capacity of a cross-corner mentor for his landlady. Mauney was assigned to a place between the two men, while Lee sat down at the opposite side.
“It’s a grand morning, Mr. Bard,” said Stalton, as he poured some medicine into a spoon from a large bottle by his place. Perhaps, thought Mauney, Stalton’s gray hair and flabby grey face were evidence of some chronic ailment—the wearing effects of pain. He felt sorry for his table companion.