"Oh, above all things, don't be conceited, or I can't think of it."
"That means you will think of it?"
"You're really not half bad! You caught that on time. Yes, I'll help you in your joke, to punish their silliness, but only for a week, on trial you understand."
Pellams, gratified, put out his hand, not in fashionable wise, but as he would grip a man's. Yet in doing so he noted, looking at her fully for the first time, that the light hair on her temples came down low on the sides, as his mother's did.
On the way up to her room, Miss Graham stood for some moments smiling at an irrelative picture of Westminster Abbey, hanging in the parlor. Having gone driving before their faces, it was more presentable not to be dropped. Also, there was an undeniable pleasure in refuting any of Florence Meiggs's arguments, the one concerning love-affairs and scholarship, for instance. Besides, he was a dear, amusing thing, and a perfect novice.
During the week that followed, Pellams learned a few things. The experiment was by no means a bore. He discovered that it is easier to be joshed than to josh—when you know in your heart you have the joke on the other fellow. He learned the revengefulness of Perkins' nature, old Ted, who was ragged to death when his case on Lillian Arnold developed and who now paid him back with interest. He found how great an object of interest to the co-ed element a man becomes when he is in love. All this was good for the woman-hater, giving him new views of things and teaching him patience. Many times during the ordeal he blessed his dramatic talent. It helped him to pretend a chap when he did not feel it. It served him in assuming an air of "the game is worth the candle," when the whole tableful at the house requoted to him certain scathing remarks on the girl-habit which, in the day of his single blessedness, he had made to each one of them separately. It was more than useful to him when he rolled into the "Knockery," the second evening after his sad condition had become patent, and the assembled company rose to smother him with sofa cushions and lecture him, with decided seriousness, on the evil effect of girling. There were times, indeed, when he didn't have to assume any chap at all, when it came of itself; for example, when the crowd punned on the girl's name, "Graham gems" was a favorite. Somehow, he wished that they wouldn't drag in names that way.
The week ended. He had done beautifully. Looking it over, he was proud of his achievements. Two evenings at the library; a brazen walk every day at the 10.30 period, which both had vacant; a stroll in the moonlit Quad, planned to interest the crowd at the Tuesday evening lecture; two calls at Roble—that was going it pretty heavy. The whole college was smiling at them, and the foolish Rho house hugged itself in the blissful silence of his sarcastic tongue.
