FACTS AND "HIGHER TRUTH"
"Mr. Beason," said Georgia McCormick, looking across the dinner table at the new student who had come to live with them—almost every one who lived around the university had "students"—"if you had a dear cousin who had married a dear friend, if said dear cousin and dear friend had gone skipping away to Europe, and for one year and a half had flitted gayly from country to country, looking into each other's eyes and murmuring sweet nothings all the while that you had been earning your daily bread by telling daily untruths for a daily paper, if at the end of said period said cousin and friend, forced by a steadily diminishing bank account to return to the stern necessities of life, had written you a nonchalant little note telling you to 'look up a place for them to lay their heads'—which being translated in terms of action meant that you were to walk the streets looking for vacant houses when vacant houses there were none—if this combination of circumstances befell you, Mr. Beason—just what would you do?"
Beason pondered the matter carefully. Mr. Beason applied the scientific method to everything in life, and was not one to commit himself rashly. "I think," he announced, weightily, "that I would tell them to go to a hotel and stay there until they could look up their own house."
"But Mr. Beason," she rambled on, eyes twinkling—Georgia had decided this young man needed "waking up"—"suppose you loved them both very dearly—suppose they were positively the dearest people who ever walked the earth—and that breaking your neck for them was the greatest pleasure life could confer upon you—what would you do then?"
"I'm sure I don't know," said Beason, bluntly; "I never loved any one that dearly."
"'Tis better to love and break one's neck,"—began Harry Wyman, who aspired to the position of class poet.
"If you had ever known Ernestine and Karl,"—a tenderness creeping into
Georgia's voice—"you'd be almost willing to hunt houses for them.
Almost, I say—for I doubt if any affection on earth should be put to the
house-hunting test. Even my cousin Dr. Karl Hubers———"
"Your—cousin?"—Beason broke in. "Your—?"—in telling the story Georgia always spoke of the unflattering emphasis on the final your. But at the time she could think of nothing save the transformed face of John Beason. The instantaneousness with which he had waked up was fairly gruesome. He was looking straight at Georgia; all three were held by his manner.
"Now my dear Mr. Beason," she laughed finally, "don't be so hard on us. My mother and Dr. Hubers' mother were sisters, but please don't rub it in so unmercifully that poor mother has been altogether distanced in the matter of offspring. You see mother married an Irish politician—hence me. While Aunt Katherine—Karl's mother—married a German scholar—therefore Karl. And the German scholar was the son of a German professor. In fact, from all I have been led to believe the Hubers were busily engaged in the professoring business at the time Julius Caesar stalked up from Italy."
"Now Georgia," hastened Mrs. McCormick earnestly, "this newspaper work gives you such a tendency to exaggerate. I never heard it said before that the family went that far back."