"Certainly I shall!" declared Langdon. "A reminiscent mood is the proper one for the road to Mayfield—just as you have to have an argumentative one on the road back."
"Did you ever notice," observed Dick, "that every Mayfield time has a sort of motif? You have a central idea, and you expand on it, like writing paragraphs for English Eight."
"It's up to you, Mr. Langdon. Give us a motif and we'll do the expanding," said Marion, shying a pebble at a gate where there was a dog he knew.
"How would Jimmie's sore-head do?"
Pellams took it up at once. "Death to the sore-head! A bas Mason!" And then, being safely away from the Hall, he caught up the old nonsense air that has split student throats this century long,
"To drive dull care away!"
And Jimmie, a chum beating him on either side to exorcise the demon, was singing as lustily as the best of them when they swung through the town of buried ambitions and into the shrine of Bacchus.
"Gentlemen, remember the motif!" cried Pellams, when they had made their way through the barroom loafers, playing with dingy cards at the dingier tables. The expedition was safely stowed in the back room around the rough table with its carved patch-work of initials, Greek letters, and nicknames, significant or obsolete, according to a man's perspective. Pellams assumed instant control.
"We will now turn our attention to the serious business of the evening. Get your places. Hands on your bottles! Open—corks! And away we go." The party drank in silence.
"Do you begin to improve, James? There is a trace of a smile in the left-hand corner of the patient's mouth. Ruffle up his hair and give him another while we have him going!"