The “Lady” came in for occasional notice in nearly every letter. “The ‘Interruption,’” he wrote, “has had a disturbing effect on me. Somehow between my audiences and myself the phantom smile of the unknown mocks me, although I haven’t seen her again. When I speak confidently out of my store of book-knowledge the smile seems to broaden into a grin; but when I quote Aristotle or Plato, it positively laughs in derision.”
In public, he explained, he had come to be consciously on the defensive. He began to avoid book authorities and seek illustration from his slender personal experience of men and things. Occasionally she drove him to take off his glasses and look about him. In his off hours, instead of burrowing in the library, he walked about the streets and observed the throngs. He wandered along the aisles of department stores, chatted with policemen, and elbowed workmen in the trolley cars; sat in the public squares and talked with the old men who sun themselves there daily, and with the youngish tramps, down at the heel and beery.
Once he had wandered on a wharf where excursionists were about to embark for a brief trip down the river. A rosy mother was struggling with a huge picnic basket and a medley of children. She let him help her with the next youngest baby, while the husband with two toddlers was surging ahead to secure a good seat. Before Blynn had quite made up his mind what to do next, the boat had slid off into the stream and he was in for a first-hand experience of the “dull pleasures of the mob.”
It was pleasure, he had to admit some hours later, but by no means dull. He exhausted all the slot devices for chewing gum and chocolate, weighed the kiddies on all the machines, invested wholesale in lemonade and bananas, and actually waltzed to the strains of a harp and one violin. At Houston Park they swooped down upon the carrousel, captured places on the scenic railway by vulgar bribery, and eventually “set ’em up” to a dessert of “hoky-poky” ice cream, as part-payment for a share of the basket lunch.
The young husband permitted all this gallantry without surprise. Indeed, in the twilight trip homeward Blynn and he sat together in the stern of the boat and smoked out a fine friendship—one exhausted kiddie asleep content in the professor’s arms—and there it was he paid Blynn the fine compliment of inquiring where he “worked.”
“At Holden College,” Blynn replied, guiltily waving a hand in a vague professional manner, the which his companion seemed to take as the motions of mopping a floor.
“Purdy soft, hey?” he grinned.
“Tolerable,” said Blynn.
“Women do all the scrubbin’,” he volunteered.
“Aye, and they do it well,” Blynn told him.