She told Beason many things—some of them facts and some of them "higher truth," Georgia holding that things which ought to be true were higher truth. She told him how Karl had tried to burn down his father's house, when a very small boy, to see if something somebody had said about fire was true, how he dissected a strange and wonderful bird which came to the house on a visitor's hat, how he inspired a whole crew of small boys to run away from home as explorers, how he whipped a bigger boy most unmercifully for calling the Germans big fools. Georgia arranged for her cousin what she called a thoroughly consistent childhood. And then some less high truth about his working his way through college, getting money enough to go abroad, his absolute forgetfulness of everything when immersed in work—facts and higher truth tallied here.
"Karl's queer," she said. "He's roasted a good deal by the academic folks—pooh-hoos a lot of their stuff, you know. He seems to have a strange notion that science, learning, the whole business is for humanity. Unique conception, isn't it?"
After she went away, Beason said he had no doubt that when one came to know Miss McCormick, he would see, in spite of her lightness of manner, that she had many fine qualities.
"Qualities!" burst forth the enthusiastic Wyman. "Say—you just ought to hear the newspaper fellows talk about Georgia McCormick! I tell you she's a peach, and more than that, she's a brick. She's the divide-her-last-penny kind—Georgia McCormick is. And I want you to know that if ever any one had the joy of living stunt down pat, she's it. It's an honest fact that if she was put in the penitentiary and you went to see her after she'd been there awhile, she'd tell you so many funny and interesting things about the pen. that you'd feel sore to think you weren't in yourself. And smart? And a hustler? Well, her paper's done some fool things, but it's had sense to hold on to her all right-all right."
And Beason replied that of course Dr. Hubers' cousin was bound to be smart.
CHAPTER V
THE HOME-COMING
"Yes, suh, Chicago only two hours, suh," and the porter smiled broadly.
There was both memory and anticipation in that smile.
The car was almost empty. Across the aisle a man slept peacefully; a little farther ahead a young lady read of the joys and sorrows of a knight and his lady who had lived some several hundred years before, and still farther on a lady all in black was looking from the window, evidently lost to sorrows of more recent date. As no one was paying any attention to the man and woman back there in the rear of the car it was perfectly safe, when the porter passed on, for her hand to slip over into his.
He responded with that quiet, protecting smile which always made it seem no bad thing could ever come to her.