She said she supposed she was. And she did.
Triumphantly he said, "Hadn't we better announce our engagement?"
This threw her into a spasm of fear. "Oh, not yet! Not yet! I'm afraid to let the students all know it. A little later—on Commencement Day will be time enough."
He bowed to her decision—not for the last time.
For a time Litton had taken pleasure in employing his learning in the service of Martha's beauty. He called her classic names—Meæ Deliciæ, or Glukutate, or Melema. A poem that he had always thought the last word in silliness became a modest expression of his own emotions—the poem in which Catallus begs Lesbia, "Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then a thousand more, then a second hundred; then, when we have made up thousands galore, we shall mix them up so that we shall not know—nor any enemy be able to cast a spell because he knows—how many kisses there are."
His scholarship began to weary her, however, and it began to seem an affectation to him; so that he was soon mangling the English language in speech and in the frequent notes he found it necessary to send his idol on infinitely unimportant matters that could not wait from after lunch to after dinner.
She coined phrases for him, too, and his heart rejoiced when she achieved the epoch-making revision of Stuart into Stookie-tookie! He had thought that Toodie was wonderful, but it was a mere stepping-stone to Stookie-tookie.
Her babble ran through his head like music, and it softened his heart, so that almost nothing could bring him to earth except the recitations of Teed, who crashed through the classics like a bull in a china-shop or, as Litton's Greeks put it, like an ass among beehives.
During those black days when Litton had quarreled with Martha he had fiercely reminded Teed that only a month remained before his final examinations, and warned him that he would hold him strictly to account. No classics, no diploma!
Teed had sulked and moped while Litton sulked and moped; but when Litton was reconciled to Martha the sun seemed to come out on Teed's clouded world, too. He took a sudden extra interest in his electrical studies and obtained permission to work in the laboratory overtime. He obtained permission even to visit the big city for certain apparatus. And he wrote the despondent, distant Fannie Newman that there would "shortly be something doing in the classics."