He told Levis about the position, feeling a little ashamed, and was relieved when Levis explained that he had agreed to take a country practice in Lancaster County.
He was given the next day new reason to expect success. Professor Mayne summoned him to his desk at the end of his last class and congratulated him upon his answers in a recent examination. Mayne was as large in body as he was in estate and his manner expressed his opulence. He had a full round voice, he used long words deliberately and with perfect correctness, and spoke with an old-fashioned rhythm, which accented now important, now unimportant words, as though he obeyed some queer quantitative law. He seemed to be health of body and mind incarnate, but an inherited susceptibility to mental disorder had forbidden his continuing his race. Life, he believed, was on the whole hideous if one stopped to consider it; but clever men did not contemplate it, they simply secured for themselves all the pleasures of the eye and the mind and the body that it was possible to get without transgressing the laws of health and common sense.
Sitting at his desk, dressed in broadcloth, he looked pleasantly at his pupil. Stephen's appearance had improved; his hair had been trimmed after a homely bang-like fashion then prevailing, sleep had refreshed him, and only the black band on his sleeve distinguished him as one afflicted. His eyelids were no longer swollen and his eyes had resumed a natural brilliancy which drew attention away from his somewhat attenuated features.
"I was interested in your contribution to the Quarterly, Lanfair. Where did you discover that antediluvian absurdity?"
"In an old magazine of my father's." Stephen could not suppress the tears which burned his eyes. His relief from anxiety softened his heart and the least expression of sympathy made him almost hysterical. "He had evidently kept it because it was a curiosity. He was a great reader. I didn't know that attention had been called to it in Thurber's textbook until Levis told me."
"We cannot be reminded of a good joke too often. I had forgotten it entirely. Continue your general reading; it will eventually prove profitable to you, no matter what department of medicine you select."
Then, remembering that Lanfair's father had just died, Professor Mayne invited him to dinner. His niece was to go with him to the theater and they would dine at six o'clock at the New Windham Hotel. His carriage was outside the building. Lanfair might just as well accompany him now. Stephen followed down the hall, his heart thumping.
His heart beat still more rapidly when he was seated opposite to Mayne and next to his niece in the hotel dining-room. The girl, Hilda Fell, was a little creature in exquisite clothes who looked up from under a pair of brows which almost met and which gave to her face a willful and imperious expression. She was very young and light as thistledown and was already spoiled by wealth and idleness. The men whom she had known hitherto were familiar with her type, but Stephen was not; he thought of her as a charming princess, and when her bright eyes met his, he looked back into them smiling, and not recognizing the intense and somewhat unwholesome curiosity about life which animated them. He had frequently heard of her as an orphan with a large estate of which a great stone house on the river front in Harrisburg near the governor's mansion was only a small part. She was an object of interest to the students who knew her by sight and who discussed endlessly her wealth and her fashionable clothes and admired her free manners. There was a current rumor that she smoked cigarettes, a habit then almost unknown among women.