He thanked her and went up. He had been up once or twice before with Lorna, indulging in very deep talk. Moral philosophy, ethics, conceptions of history! Very pleasant occasions, to be sure, but equally as strange as Freeman himself. Now, to be alone with the head of the department! The study door was closed and he knocked.
“Come,” called the professor.
As he entered he beheld the historian, lounging in a deep Morris chair before a grate fire, with an open book on his knees.
“Well, Mauney,” he said pleasantly, as he rose. “Won’t you sit down?”
Professor Robert Freeman was such a mite of a man that Mauney wondered how he had managed to brave the storm of life for fifty years. Whenever he saw him he felt like saying: “Well, professor, I expected, before seeing you again, to hear of your funeral. I expected you’d pick up a pneumonia germ somewhere and pass out.”
Mauney would know him better later on, for the biological tragedy entailed in a struggle between germs and this frail body had been given as careful consideration by its owner as almost everything else, and, arguing that continued existence depended either on keeping up a strong physical resistance or else on avoiding germs altogether, Freeman chose to pursue the latter policy. His cunning brain saved him. He never rode on street cars. He avoided funerals, theatres and churches. “Germs? Why, don’t get them. That’s all!”
Freeman’s long, thin face, with its grey eyes trained upon the world like vigilant sentinels, smiled perpetually. His nearly-bald pate sported a little patch of thin, grey hair, parted carefully in the centre. But that smile! It was, in a sense, all of Freeman.
“What kind of smile, in reality, is it?” thought Mauney.
Never a happy smile, though at times it betokened delight. Never a suspicious smile, though it frequently indicated deep-buried fires of irony that could not be given full scope. Usually it was a polite, deferential grimace, that suggested Voltaire ever so slightly. So far from being repulsive, it put Mauney immediately at ease. Its social value was its hospitality, an almost pitying hospitality, as if the professor was pleased enough to have intercourse with others of the same biological species, seeing what a mess life was for all of them.
“That’s exactly it,” soliloquized Mauney. “That unpleasant, insuperable, unavoidable mess—human life. It’s his stock-in-trade.”