“Out with them, man; out with them!” demanded Phœbe.
“Some of them need expurgating badly,” warned Richard.
“The Court must be entertained,” said Phœbe, “even at the expense of a little vulgarity. Proceed, sir.”
“The saddest case,” Jawn searched his memory, “is that of a lady of my college days whose name I did not know, but who welcomed and nobly assisted my young aspirations; who, in short, taught me much.”
Then he recited the “epitaph” of the lass who caught his heart during the early weeks of his Freshmanhood, who led him on outrageously, who looked the part of an under-grad in the high school, but who turned out to be the wife of the Dean!
“These college professors will often fool you,” Jawn explained. “They marry the cutest little springers with the feathers still on their legs——”
“Don’t remind me of my Orpingtons!” cried Phœbe.
“—And with round little blushing peach-blow faces! It would fool anyone. You see, they are a shy lot all their young days, the professors are, the years when they should have been prancing about colt-like and finding out things. So they fly from the sight of women and sit in their cells and grow ogre-eyed and brainy. Then late in life they slide out in the twilight and grab a Young One. There ought to be a law against it.”
The charge of “gallivantin’” was amply proved, at least against Jawn, by his own series of poetic confessions.
“And you say you’ve already had seventy-seven affairs with the ladies!” Phœbe expressed her incredulity.