Then Kate brought me fresh coffee and Mrs. Gregory came in and continued her meal and the talk became interesting, thanks to Mr. Gregory who couldn’t help saying how the fire in Chicago had stimulated Christianity in his hearers and given him a great text. I mentioned casually that I had been in the fire and told of Randolph Street Bridge and the hanging and what else I saw there and on the lakefront that unforgettable Monday morning.
At first Kate went in and out of the room removing dishes as if she were not concerned in the story, but when I told of the women and girls half-naked at the lakeside while the flames behind us reached the zenith in a red sheet that kept throwing flame-arrows ahead and started the ships burning on the water in front of us, she too stopped to listen.
At once I caught my cue, to be liked and admired by all the rest; but indifferent, cold to her. So I rose as if her standing enthralled had interrupted me and said:
“I’m sorry to keep you: I’ve talked too much, forgive me!” and betook myself to my room in spite of the protests and prayers to continue of all the rest. Kate just flushed; but said nothing.
She attracted me greatly: she was infinitely desirable, very good-looking and very young (only sixteen, her mother said later) and her great hazel eyes were almost as exciting as her pretty mouth or large hips and good height. She pleased me intimately but I resolved to win her altogether and felt I had begun well: at any rate she would think about me and my coldness.
I spent the evening in putting out my half dozen books, not forgetting my medical treatises, and then slept, the deep sleep of sex recuperation.
The next morning I called on Smith again where he lived with the Reverend Mr. Kellogg, who was the Professor of English History in the University, Smith said. Kellogg was a man of about forty, stout and well-kept, with a faded wife of about the same age. Rose, the pretty servant, let me in: I had a smile and warm word of thanks for her: she was astonishingly pretty, the prettiest girl I had seen in Lawrence: medium height and figure with quite lovely face and an exquisite rose-leaf skin! She smiled at me; evidently my admiration pleased her.
Smith, I found, had got books for me, Latin and Greek-English dictionaries, a Tacitus too and Xenophon’s Memorabilia with a Greek grammar: I insisted on paying for them all and then he began to talk. Tacitus he just praised for his superb phrases and the great portrait of Tiberius—“perhaps the greatest historical portrait ever painted in words.” I had a sort of picture of King Edward the Fourth in my romantic head, but didn’t venture to trot it out. But soon, Smith passed to Xenophon and his portrait of Socrates as compared with that of Plato. I listened all ears while he read out a passage from Xenophon, painting Socrates with little human touches: I got him to translate every word literally and had a great lesson, resolving when I got home, I’d learn the whole page by heart. Smith was more than kind to me: he said I’d be able to enter the Junior Class and thus have only two years to graduation. If Willie gave me back even five hundred dollars, I’d be able to get through without care or work.
Then Smith told me how he had gone to Germany after his American University: how he had studied there and then worked in Athens at ancient Greek for another year till he could talk classic Greek as easily as German. “There were a few dozen Professors and students” he said, “who met regularly and talked nothing but classic Greek: they were always trying to make the modern tongue just like the old.” He gave me a translation of “Das Kapital” of Marx, and in fifty ways inspired and inspirited me to renewed effort.
I came back to the Gregorys for dinner and discussed in my own mind whether I should go to Mrs. Mayhew’s as I had promised or work at Greek: I decided to work and then and there made a vow always to prefer work, a vow more honored in the breach, I fear, than in the observance. But at least I wrote to Mrs. Mayhew excusing myself and promising her the next afternoon. Then I set myself to learn by heart the two pages in the “Memorabilia.”