"Why haven't we known you before?" Medora T. Phillips asked him at a small
reception. Mrs. Phillips spoke out loudly and boldly, and held his hand as
long as she liked. No, not as long as she liked, but longer than most women
would have felt at liberty to do. And besides speaking loudly and boldly,
she looked loudly and boldly; and she employed a determined smile which
seemed to say, "I'm old enough to do as I please." Her brusque informality
was expected to carry itself off--and much else besides. "Of course I
simply _can't_ be half so intrepid as I seem!" it said. "Everybody
about us understands that, and I must ask your recognition too for an
ascertained fact."

"Known me?" returned Cope, promptly enough. "Why, you haven't known me
because I haven't been here to _be_ known." He spoke in a ringing,
resonant voice, returning her unabashed pressure with a hearty good will
and blazing down upon her through his clear blue eyes with a high degree of
self-possession, even of insouciance. And he explained, with a liberal
exhibition of perfect teeth, that for the two years following his
graduation he had been teaching literature at a small college in Wisconsin
and that he had lately come back to Alma Mater for another bout: "I'm after
that degree," he concluded.

"Haven't been here?" she returned. "But you _have_ been here; you must
have been here for years--for four, anyhow. So why haven't we...?" she
began again.

"Here as an undergraduate, yes," he acknowledged. "Unregarded dust. Dirt
beneath your feet. In rainy weather, mud."

"Mud!" echoed Medora Phillips loudly, with an increased pressure on his
long, narrow hand. "Why, Babylon was built of mud--of mud bricks, anyway.