CHAPTER IV


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