“You’re not if you were born in England.”
“Oh, I say, Winslow, a chap can’t control that! I might have been born in France, you know. Fact is, I came rather near it! But that wouldn’t have made me a Frenchie, eh?”
“No, but your father’s English and you were born in England. That makes you a British citizen, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, yes, but——” He paused. Then, confidentially: “Fact is, Winslow, I’m awfully fond of this country, don’t you know, and as long as I’m going to be here at Grafton two years I’d like to—to be like the rest of you, if you know what I mean. Of course, I am English. There’s no getting around that. But my mother’s American as anything. Her family has lived in Maryland for a hundred and fifty years, I think it is, and I always consider myself about half American, too. On the other side, now, they’re always taking me for a Yankee.”
Bert laughed. “They might on the other side, but they wouldn’t here, Ordway! This is School Hall. The recitation rooms and offices are on the first two floors. On the third floor there’s the assembly room where you attend chapel in the morning and hear lectures and things. On the floor above are the clubrooms: The Forum, the Literary, the Glee, and the Banjo and Mandolin. And the Campus, the monthly paper, has its rooms there, too. The building beyond is Manning. That’s where the juniors live. It’s about like Lothrop, only it has ten more rooms.”
“The juniors live by themselves, eh? How young are they?”
“Oh, we have ’em as young as twelve now and then, but that’s unusual. They’re thirteen and fourteen, mostly. The rooms downstairs on this end are Jules’s. That’s Mr. Teschner, French and German instructor. He and Mrs. Teschner have four rooms there, separate from the rest of the hall. Then Mrs. Prouty, the matron, lives on the floor above, just over them. ‘Mother Prouty,’ the fellows call her. Mr. Gring is on that floor, and Mr. Sargent on the floor above. They call Gring ‘Cupid’ and Sargent ‘Pete.’ All the faculty have pet names. Doctor Duncan—that’s his cottage there behind the trees—is ‘Charlie.’ Then there’s ‘Nell’; you’ll have him in math; his name is Nellis; and Mr. Smiley is called ‘Smiles,’ and Mr. Gibbs is ‘Gusty,’ and Mr. Rumford is ‘Jimmy,’ and Mr. Russell is ‘J. P.,’ and so on.”
“I’ll have to learn them, won’t I?” asked Ordway soberly. “That’s the gymnasium there, isn’t it? I fancy it isn’t open, eh?”
“I don’t believe so.”
“I had a lot of fun in the summer looking at the catalogue and wondering what things would really be like. You know, you Americans have——”