“Do with it?” gasped the Duchess. “Take it home to your family! Set it up on your front lawn! Hand it down to your children! Only get the hideous thing off these premises and never bring it back!”
William obediently toted off the bust. Then the Duchess looked about for the giver of this good and perfect gift. But Nathan had reached the gate and was fleeing down the walk. For him there was no party.
William took the “monument” home. The last seen of it was atop a post in the center of the Chew cornfield. The colored man had draped a coat around the classic bust, hung trousers beneath it, put an old straw hat on the brow that produced the Commentaries, and relegated it to the job of scaring off the crows. Its end came when old Webster Nelson wandered into the field one night under the influence of liquor, beheld the chalky features beneath the hat, and reduced it to fragments under the crazed obsession that he was being confronted by the supernatural.
III
A little girl makes love to a boy in school by the simple expedient of allowing him to discover her eyes upon him steadily when he raises his head from his studies and looks in her direction. Nathan dragged himself to school next day. But the topaz eyes of Bernice-Theresa were not upon him,—once! Thereupon did life become a delusion and a snare and sorrow sit heavily upon him.
The Dresden Doll came out of the Academy at four o’clock and started homeward. By some mysterious levitation, she had not progressed three blocks before the street held a party of the opposite sex employed in touching every other picket in the fence, withal moving in her own direction.
“Say!” this person demanded plaintively, having somehow crossed the thoroughfare by the time she reached the Baptist Church. “Are you mad at me, Bernie?”
“Of course I’m mad! Why shouldn’t I be mad? You tried to spoil my party.”
“I didn’t mean to spoil your party.”
“Perhaps you didn’t. But you’re such a fool at times!”