Ooo, what a funny way to talk! “Certainly.” It is queer, how hard it is to keep from getting an accent like that too, while she talks to him. “Yes, I’d like to see you again before you leave. It doesn’t happen to be a very—busy time for me just now.”
“How fortunate! I don’t want to interfere with your studies. Can’t we have dinner this evening?”
“Oh—why—yes, thank you, I’d like to. At six-thirty? Good-bye.”
Oh, well, Tom ought to excuse her for an out-of-town friend. That is perfectly legitimate.
“Hello. Alpha Belt house? Is that Tom? Well, listen, Tom? I hope you won’t be perfectly furious because I really can’t help it, but it’s this way——”
A co-ed is a well-protected person, in spite of what may be read in the newspapers about her freedom. She is so hemmed in by public opinion—not the opinion of the outside world, but that of her own public, the campus—that it is with a distinct sense of guilt that she associates with anyone so foreign as an out-of-town visitor, be his appearance ever so distinguished. Not that Dorothy isn’t thrilled as well as apprehensive. If she dared, she would even have dined in the roseate and familiar publicity of Ye Kandy Shoppe, stared at by her friends and causing a poorly concealed flurry of gossip. But you would be puzzled by Ye Kandy Shoppe, and perhaps dissatisfied with the food. That is why you proceed solemnly through the menu of the Imperial Hotel Dining-room, sherbet-on-the-side and all, surrounded by the younger married set of the town, with an occasional drummer or a professor’s party.
“Well, yes, I see that you know Genevieve quite well,” you are saying. “Much better than I do. It’s perhaps the only fault that I can find with my work—the lack of real social contact. Going and coming as I do, I must resign myself to being the picturesque figure; oft forgotten. Interesting, perhaps, but so occasionally!” Smile.
“But doesn’t your work keep you in one place at a time pretty much?” asks Dorothy. “I thought it took at least six years at a time to build bridges. Surely there are people there—in Abyssinia, or wherever you’re going next?”
“People? My dear child, you’ve been going to the movies. The natives are really dark—much more so than you seem to suspect. Of course once in a while you do find people, and if they are people at all, you understand, they mean much more to you than they would here, at home. That mode of life has given me a distressingly intense way of taking my friends, I find. You children with your great circles of acquaintances wouldn’t understand my attitude.”