"This is very kind of you, Mrs. Holton. Please be sure that I appreciate it."
Charles Holton bowed profoundly, and lifted his head for a closer inspection of Mrs. Lois Montgomery Holton.
He had called for Phil, whom he had engaged to escort to a lecture in the Athenæum Course. When his note proposing this entertainment reached Phil, she dutifully laid it before her mother who lay on her bed reading a French novel.
"Special delivery! A wild extravagance when there's a perfectly good telephone in the house."
Lois read the note twice; her eyes resting lingeringly upon the signature.
"Wayland Brown Bayless, LL.D., on 'Sunshine and Shadow.' He was giving that same lecture here when I was a girl; it ought to be well mellowed by this time. Either the president of the college or the pastor of Center Church will present him to the audience and the white pitcher of Sugar Creek water that is always provided. Well, it's a perfectly good lecture, and old enough to be respectable: Smiles and sobs stuck in at regular intervals. I approve of the lecture, Phil. I'd almost make Amzi take me, just to see how Bayless, LL.D., looks after all these years. Away back there when I heard him he looked so old I thought he must have been a baby playing in the sand when they carved the Sphinx."
She returned the note to Phil and her eyes reverted to the book.
"What about it, mamma?"
"Oh, about going! Let me see. This is the other Holton boy, so to speak—the provider of American Beauties, as distinguished from the dispenser of quails?"
Phil confirmed this.