"Thursday, then," she said, with a definitive hand on the knob of the door.

Randolph went down the front walk with a slight stir of elation--a feeling
that had come to be an infrequent visitor enough. He hoped that the company
would be not only predominantly youthful, but exclusively so--aside from
the hostess and himself. And even she often had her young days and her
young spots. It would doubtless be clamorous; yet clamor, understood and
prepared for, might be met with composure.




6

_COPE DINES--AND TELLS ABOUT IT_


Cope pushed away the last of the themes and put the cork back in the red-
ink bottle. Here was a witless girl who seemed to think that Herrick and
Cowper were contemporaries. The last sense to develop in the Western void
was apparently the sense of chronology--unless, indeed, it were a sense for
the shades of difference which served to distinguish between one age and
another and provided the raw material that made chronology a matter of
consequence at all.

"If there were only one more," muttered Cope, looking at the pile of sheets
under the gas-globe, "I should probably learn that Chaucer derived from
Beaumont and Fletcher."