His idea for a josh involved Miss Graham. So he waited for her deliberately outside the door of the French class next morning; she had stopped to talk to the instructor after the class had left. Jimmy Mason and four or five of the regular Quad loafers were talking football on the curbing. Pellams joined them. Then the gravity of the step he was about to take came over him with a sense of oppression. He felt much as on that Easter morning, years before, when his mother had dragged him out to be confirmed.
"The Berkeley faculty won't let Dudley play," Mason was saying. "He hasn't—where are you speeding in such a rush?" he added and then stopped, paralyzed.
It is probable that if her eyes had not laughed at him with that twinkle of good-fellowship which he had noted on the night of the supper, Pellams never would have had the nerve. That look hauled him over the Rubicon; they went down the arcade together, in the face of Jimmy Mason, the loafers, the whole crowd shifting between lectures. Yet the sun shone as brightly on the palm-circles, the Quadrangle pillars kept their perpendicular. A little later Mason saw the couple sitting under the 'Ninety-five Oak. He whistled to himself with a look that meant: "You wait, old josher till you get into the Knockery again!"
"Now," said Pellams, under the Oak, "you have about the same ideas on love-affairs as I have and you'll sympathize with me in this thing. When I got in to dinner last night, the gang gave me the hottest jolly of my misspent life. They're all alike; they can't understand having a straight friendship for a girl without it's being a puppy-love. So they tumble at once that my driving you means I'm yours for keeps. That sort of a thing makes me tres fatigué and I've a scheme."
"Not your first, is it?"
"In what way do you—"
"I know something of your 'schemes,' young man; that fake fraternity and the snipe-hunts and an examination in English 1 c."
"Oh, those!" Pellams did not blush at the record. Instead, he smiled. His smile was always worth seeing. It was the point of one of his Club stunts. Every muscle got into the interference and his round face grew rosy into the roots of his thick brown hair.
This grin was not lost upon Katharine.