Angel of the skies! My own Flossie-dovelet! Your Little Brownie has not seenest thee for a whole half a day, and he is pining, starving, famishing, perishing for a word from your blushing liplets. Oh, my Peaches and Cream! Oh, my Sugar Plum! How can your Pet Chickie live the eternity until he claspeths thee again this evening? When can your Brownie-wownie call you all his ownest only one? Ten billion kisses I send you from
Your own, owner, ownest
Pet Chickie-Brownie.
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
The X's, Flossie explained, indicated kisses—a dozen to an X.
The jury laughed Little Brownie out of court after pinning a twenty-five-thousand-dollar verdict to his coat-tail. The nation elected him the Pantaloon of the hour and pounded him with bladders and slap-sticks.
Professor Litton had heard nothing of the preliminary fanfare of the suit. As he read of it now he was too much puzzled to be amused. He read with the same incredulity he had felt when he heard the janitor quote Teed's remarks to his fiancée. Litton called his landlady's attention to the remarkable case. She had been reading it, with greedy glee, every morning. She had had such letters herself in her better days. She felt sorry for poor Mr. Brown and sorrier for the poor professor when he said:
"Poor Mr. Brown must have gone quite insane. Nobody could have built up such wealth without brains; yet nobody with brains could have written such letters. Ergo, he has lost his brains."
"You'll be late to prayers," was all the landlady said. She treated Litton as if he were a half-witted son. And he obeyed her, forsook his unfinished tea and hurried away to the chapel. Thence he went to his class-room, where Teed achieved some further miracles of mistranslation. Litton thought how curious it was that this young man, of whom his scientific professor spoke so highly, should have fallen into the same delirium of amorous idiocy as the famous plutocrat, Joel Brown.
When the class was dismissed he sank back in his chair by the class-room window. It was wide ajar to-day for the first time since winter. April, like an early-morning housemaid, was throwing open all the windows of the world. Litton felt a delicious lassitude; he was bewildered with leisure. A kind of sweet loneliness fell on him. He had made no provision for times like these.
He sat back and twiddled his thumbs. His eyes roved lazily about the campus. The wind that fluttered the sparse forelock on his overweening forehead hummed in his ears. It had a distance in it. It brought soft cadences of faint voices from the athletic field. They seemed to come from no place nearer than the Athenian Academe.
Along the paths of the campus a few women were sauntering, for the students and teachers in the Women's Annex had the privilege of the libraries, the laboratories, and lecture-rooms.
Across Litton's field of view passed a figure that caught his eye. Absently he followed it as it enlarged with approach. He realized that it was Prof. Martha Binley, Ph.D., who taught Greek over there in the Annex.