“That’s who she was.”
Awful stillness.
“Why — here — who told you that?” said Mr. Leonard, bewildered, but considering matrimony a wild and possibly dangerous myth.
“Who told you, boy?”
“What was she, then?” said Tom Davis pointedly.
“Why — not exactly,” Mr. Leonard murmured, rubbing his chin.
“She was a Bad Woman,” said Eugene.
Then, most desperately, he added: “She was a Little Chippie.”
“Pap” Rheinhart drew in his breath sharply.
“What’s that, what’s that, what’s that?” cried Mr. Leonard rapidly when he could speak.
Fury boiled up in him.
He sprang from his chair.
“What did you say, boy?”
But he thought of Margaret and looked down, with a sudden sense of palsy, into the white ruination of boy-face.
Too far beyond.
He sat down again, shaken.
— Whose foulest cry was shafted with his passion, whose greatest music flowered out of filth —
“Nulla potest mulier tantum se dicere amatam
Vere, quantum a me Lesbia amata mea es.”
“You should be more careful of your talk, Eugene,” said Mr. Leonard gently.
“See here!” he exclaimed suddenly, turning with violence to his book.
“This is getting no work done.
Come on, now!” he said heartily, spitting upon his intellectual hands.
“You rascals you!” he said, noting Tom Davis’ grin.
“I know what you’re after — you want to take up the whole period.”
Tom Davis’ hearty laughter boomed out, mingling with his own whine.
“All right, Tom,” said Mr. Leonard briskly, “page 43, section 6, line 15.
Begin at that point.”
At this moment the bell rang and Tom Davis’ laughter filled the room.
Nevertheless, in charted lanes of custom, he gave competent instruction.
He would perhaps have had difficulty in constructing a page of Latin prose and verse with which he had not become literally familiar by years of repetition.
In Greek, certainly, his deficiency would have been even more marked, but he would have known a second aorist or an optative in the dark (if he had ever met it before).
There were two final years of precious Greek: they read the Anabasis.
“What’s the good of all this stuff?” said Tom Davis argumentatively.
Mr. Leonard was on sure ground here.
He understood the value of the classics.
“It teaches a man to appreciate the Finer Things.
It gives him the foundations of a liberal education.
It trains his mind.”
“What good’s it going to do him when he goes to work?” said
“Pap” Rheinhart.
“It’s not going to teach him how to grow more corn.”
“Well — I’m not so sure of that,” said Mr. Leonard with a protesting laugh.
“I think it does.”
“Pap” Rheinhart looked at him with a comical cock of the head.
He had a wry neck, which gave his humorous kindly face a sidelong expression of quizzical maturity.
He had a gruff voice; he was full of rough kindly humor, and chewed tobacco constantly.
His father was wealthy.
He lived on a big farm in the Cove, ran a dairy and had a foundry in the town.
They were unpretending people — German stock.