"She's a pretty girl all right," I ventured again.
"Pretty as h—," whispered Sagner.
As we rounded the corner of the house the long French window blazed forth on us. Clear and bright in the lamplight stood Lennart with his right arm cuddling the girl to his side. "Little sister," he was saying, "let's go back to the piano and have some more music." Smiling her kindly good night we saw Mrs. Lennart gather up her books and start off limpingly across the hall, with the devoted boy following close behind her.
"Then she's really lame?" I asked Sagner as we swung into the noisy gravel path.
"Oh, yes," he said; "she got hurt in a runaway accident four years ago. Lennart doesn't know how to drive a goat!"
"Seems sort of too bad," I mused dully.
Then Sagner laughed most astonishingly. "Yes, sort of too bad," he mocked me.
It was almost ten o'clock when we circled back to the college library. Only a few grinds were there buzzing like June-bugs round the low-swinging green lamps. Even the librarian was missing. But Madge Hubert, the librarian's daughter, was keeping office hours in his stead behind a sumptuous old mahogany desk. At the very first college party that I had attended, Madge Hubert had been pointed out to me with a certain distinction as being the girl that Bertus Sagner was almost in love with. Then, as now, I was startled by the surprising youthfulness of her. Surely she was not more than three years ahead of the young girl whom we had left at Professor Lennart's house. With unmistakable friendly gladness she welcomed Sagner to the seat nearest her, and accorded me quite as much chair and quite as much smile as any new man in a university town really deserved. In another moment she had closed her book, pushed a full box of matches across the table to us, and switched off the electric light that fairly threatened to scorch her straight blond hair.
One by one the grinds looked up and nodded and smiled, and puckered their vision toward the clock, and "folded their tents like the Arabs and silently stole away," leaving us two men there all alone with the great silent room, and the long, rangy, echoing metal book-stacks, and the duddy-looking portraits, and the dopy-acting busts, and the sleek gray library cat—and the girl. Maybe Sagner came every Wednesday night to help close the library.
Certainly I liked the frank, almost boyish manner in which the two friends included me in their friendship by seeming to ignore me altogether.