“Exactly!” he nodded firmly. “So I avoided a scene and drove myself home.” And therefore, one day he did not “meet” one fussy little member.
“I just couldn’t stand that fellow,” Blynn grew rigid. “He is a puffy-looking, self-assertive sort of nobody. Everybody knows that he was appointed on the board because he is a relative of a man who has a friend who was able to influence somebody who knew somebody who could get him the appointment—one of those absurd selections that happen every now and then in America, due to the hysteric ambition of some small person, helped out by the easy-going American character. Well, this Nobody presumes to busy himself with the affairs of Holden, talks about it, bothers everybody as if he really had judgment. I couldn’t trust myself near him. If he had got off any of those loud-mouthed advices of his, before others, too, I’d have shut him up with his own history. So I concluded that the best thing I could do for Diccon was to vanish. I came home and locked myself up in the University library and hit on a fine trail—I analyzed pretty much all the ways in which the Elizabethan courtier complimented his lady. There’s little in it for subtle minds, but it will make a splendid popular lecture.”
Then, to avoid what was obviously to him a distressing remembrance, he dropped Holden and its affairs and told them about the gallant Elizabethan gentlemen.
“I wonder what the Elizabethan women thought about all that stuff,” the practical Gorgas summed up.
“It isn’t all stuff,” protested the professor.
“Didn’t the ladies ever reply?” questioned Kate.
“Not a word,” said Allen. “Their silence is profound. Every mother’s son was busy writing sonnets to his mistress’ eyebrow, but the ladies stood pat. The secret of high diplomacy is, Never divulge; keep ’em guessing. And they did!”
“I wish they had written,” Gorgas was thoughtful.
“No doubt they felt things as keenly as the men.... All the men wore beards, I suppose?” she continued irrelevantly.
“Undoubtedly,” Blynn’s mind was rarely personal. The merry face of Gorgas, he did not note at all; nor her attempts, with hand at mouth, to hold back a volume of laughter; nor Kate’s furtive, elderly signal of rebuke to the grinning sister. With eye mostly upon Kate, who was presenting a polite face of assumed interest, the young professor poured forth a dissertation on Elizabethan tonsorial fashions. He was summing up his conclusions when his attention was attracted by a badly suppressed squeak of laughter from Gorgas. “The beard,” he was saying, “was the sign of the gentleman, and the sign of the man. Of course they—what are you grinning at, you Cheshire kitten? Oh! see here, I’ll pluck this thing off tomorrow. I didn’t mean to wear it, anyway. It was forced on me by a villainous barber.”