For The Sake Of Argument

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Title:     For The Sake Of Argument
Author: Charles Kellogg Field [More Titles by Field]

"For we are frank and twenty
And the spring is in the air!"
HOVEY.

"Well!" said Miss Meiggs, spreading across her lap one of the Beta Rhos' new monogrammed napkins, "I must say your being here is a surprise."

Pellams answered in vague interrogation, not a little surprised, himself, to be caught at a "girl-supper." Now that he was cornered, it would be uselessly impolite to tell her how the Chapter had reasoned and pleaded with him until at the last minute "Cap" Smith ruined his clever escape by catching him midway down a porch pillar. Smith, sitting on the other side of Katharine Graham and wearing the smile of satisfied revenge, would doubtless enjoy telling it. There was so much of genial malevolence in that smile that Pellams, the woman-hater, who knew only enough of the co-eds to avoid them, wondered what sort of a girl he had been placed next to at supper. He had an intuitive idea that she had been given him by general consent. An experienced society man would have scented this at once in the company of Mrs. Perkins, for when there is a choice of tables, chapter-mothers are apt to sit where there is the least sentiment; but this was the Junior's debut, practically, and he was conscious of little more than that the fellows had it "in" for him, and that this girl had begun the conversation by a personal remark.

"I judged," the girl was saying, not having waited for any explanation, "that in the milder forms of social entertainment you were somewhat out of your element."

Pellams had missed his guess. On sitting down to their small table, he had decided that the conversation would naturally split into two divisions of three rather than into three couples, for Mrs. Perkins, Professor Grind and this Meiggs girl would enjoy themselves together, leaving him to share Smith's talk with Miss Graham, whose eyes had somehow an engaging twinkle. The idea was rudely dispelled by Miss Meiggs's immediate and decidedly personal attack. At least, he would have preferred to talk about other people, but he faced the music.

"Oh, I disapprove of them only for myself," he replied, "not for others."

"And why for yourself, particularly?"

The face of the Glee Club's comedian had assumed just the right seriousness.

"Because I'm more than susceptible and I don't want to run risks."

"Your time has come at last, then," put in his captor, Smith, with a gallant look at Miss Meiggs.

"Not at all," retorted Pellams, whose combative sense was less rusty than his skill in compliment. "If I'd been afraid of one exposure like this, do you think I'd have suggested being on deck to-night?"

Smith, with a fresh memory of their struggle, laughed at this blocking move. Katharine Graham, although she did not laugh, enjoyed Pellams's unconscious "like this." She was a Theta Gamma with Miss Meiggs, and of late there had been a little rift in their sisterly love.

The older girl was not disconcerted. She had her estimate of Pellams Chase, and he was not disproving it. There were certain things she had long wanted the chance to say to him.

"I admire your self-restraint under temptation," she said; "it is characteristic of you in other circumstances, I believe"--this with discreet emphasis--"but, really, why should you dread letting this susceptibility get the better of you?"

Pellams caught the faint sneer in the words. He hoped that Mrs. Perkins had been talking just then to her Faculty partner. Increasing his affected earnestness, he replied:

"Because, when you get gone, it is bound to knock scholarship."

Here Smith giggled audibly, for Katharine and he were really feigning talk, being more entertained by the couple across the cloth. Katharine knew that by this last statement Pellams had sounded a dominant note in the soul of her opinionated sister. She was not surprised, then, when Miss Meiggs turned more fully toward the woman-hater.

"Tell me, are you one of these people who think co-education an evil?"

"I'm afraid I am." The speech gave Pellams a certain pleasure. There was nothing about this partner they had given him that tended toward converting him to the Chapter's point of view as to the advantage of girls at college.

"Of course," continued she, "I do not take your remark about scholarship as worthy of consideration in your case, because I am in one or two of your classes, when you attend them," and Pellams, listening, gave thanks that he and Professor Grind opposite had no such relation; "but monopolized time is really the cry of a good many who would wish to work, and it is all wrong. There is no reason why we should not come here and work with you, combining friendship and study. Our presence here is, in a way, preventive of many worse things."

Pellams turned his empty salad plate between his fingers.

"Well," he drawled, "I'm not sure I know what you mean by the worse things, and I've never been to another college, except Berkeley but I can't believe as much time is spent on them as some people here give to girls," this with a dreamy look over Smith's head; "the cigarette heart can't be much worse than what takes men out of college here, and if you refer to beer----"

"I do refer to beer," said Miss Meiggs, in an iced voice.

"Oh, no!" expostulated the Junior, spreading his hands, "they couldn't do it!" He looked at her frankly. "You get a head after too much beer," he went on, reckless as to pronouns and listening professors, "and you stay sober and work, for awhile, any way. In co-education you don't get any such call-down until the Committee meets."

"Don't let him tease you, Miss Meiggs," put in Mrs. Perkins, frowning mildly at Pellams because of Professor Grind's sphinx-like smile; "he's making it all up out of his inner consciousness, like the German philosopher and the--elephant, wasn't it, Professor Grind?"

"Yes?" answered Miss Meiggs, with a world of irony packed into the syllable; "your inner consciousness, then, Mr. Chase, proves rather forcibly that in one case the influence is against refinement, while in the case of co-education it is all for it. You will grant that, I think?"

Quite by accident, Pellams caught Miss Graham's eye. The twinkle there was a sort of glorified "sic 'im!"

"On the contrary," said he, perfectly composed, "I think it's the girl that's refined."

Miss Meiggs's "What!" was almost a shriek. Foo, the table-boy, brought her just then a plate of creamy rarebit. He had a jacket of luminous green silk, with the fraternity monogram in white, and he wore his cue hanging. But the fragrance of the rarebit and the splendor of Foo's toilet were alike lost upon the aroused Miss Meiggs. Such a statement, from this man of all others!

"You are judging us with yourself as a basis of contrast, I fancy!"

Not displeased at having put her in ill-humor, and refusing a gentle attempt on Mrs. Perkins' part to lead the conversation elsewhere, he went on with aggravated seriousness:

"But there is hope for me here, with the Faculty and with books"--he choked a little over this; "a man doesn't need to go through from one to eight love-affairs."

The champion of co-education sniffed.

"Nothing was further from my thoughts," said she. "The association of men and women in an atmosphere of study does not mean sentimentality. The relation should be normal and helpful, not spoiled by extremes." Katharine had heard these views before.

"But they can't dodge the extremes, you see," persisted Pellams. "It's the place here, the walks and drives in the country and all. Your theory might work all right at a city college or even at Berkeley, but on this campus, not so!"

"The reasoning of inexperience. There are stronger interests in nature than boy-and-girl foolishness--unless one is idle. Where it results in that sort of thing, I agree that it is all wrong and prejudicial to scholarship and thoroughly unnecessary and inexcusable"--with these words a slow glance at Katharine that spoke of arguments in the past. "A man does not have to fall in love purely because he and a girl are in the country at the same time."

"But all the girls are not like you," began Pellams, and stopped at the sound of the words. They were not in the least intended to be taken as he felt that the table-full had taken them. Miss Meiggs put her fork viciously into the neglected rarebit. In the uncomfortable pause, Mrs. Perkins flutteringly passed her the cayenne pepper, but Miss Meiggs ignored the courtesy. She turned to Pellams.

"Even a love-affair," she snapped, "would benefit you more than the substitute you have chosen! You are a nice one to argue the refinement of the college girl! Are you refining yourself, your fraternity or your favorite side of the student-body by carousing at Mayfield and carrying the viciousness of that town to others where you may represent the University?"

"Oh, I say!" protested the Glee Club man, uneasily, for Grind was on the Committee; "don't be too hard on me."

"I'm sure you're unjust to Pellams," said the Chapter-mother, with a troubled look at her black lamb, who wondered what was coming: "I don't believe he----"

Miss Meiggs, peppering her rarebit deliberately, interrupted, with a little toss of the head.

"I will ask Mr. Chase one question then." She gathered some of the cheese upon her fork, and, balancing it midway to her mouth, went on with a gloating clearness of enunciation. "Please tell us why you came to the afternoon concert at the Chico Normal School this summer in a colored shirt and your dress suit, and why you did not sing your part of the program?"

"That's two questions," murmured Pellams. He could not look at Mrs. Perkins, to whom he had made certain solemn promises before that very trip; but his adversary had turned toward her with a look of righteous triumph. So deftly that even Pellams barely saw it, Katharine reached across him and peppered the forkful of rarebit just before the lips of Miss Meiggs closed over it. His answer was overlooked.

Mrs. Perkins took the sufferer up to her own room and Katharine vanished somewhere with Smith. When the tables were removed, a girl sat at the piano; her song finished, she struck briskly into the "Hot Time," and every one turned to Pellams. He sang the rag-time as though he were bursting with fun, while the Chapter sat before him, beaming its innocent gratitude. But the Glee Club man was singing to one guest alone, and he could not see her, or Smith either. When two songs had failed to bring her into view, he stole off upstairs unmolested and lay for some time with his door locked, grinning before sleep.

They hammered at his door next morning with appeals for his appearance at first-hour recitation, and fraternal reminders that he hadn't sufficient stand-in to cut. Foo went clanging the bell through the halls, dodging the shoes that flew at him through the door of a man who had nothing before the fourth hour, and the rush and hurry of late breakfast-time filled the house. But Pellams lay smoking in his narrow bed, engaged in the novel task of solving a point of etiquette. The affair of the night before was to be his final appearance in local society. His experience in small-talk with Miss Meiggs confirmed his decision to live a college life into which co-education did not enter outside his class-rooms. Yet, having once departed from the mode of such a life, he found himself under an obligation. A co-ed had found him in trouble and had done the "white" thing by him at a critical moment; even Jimmy Mason, over at the Hall, could not have stood by him any better. In an obligation to Jimmy there was no problem--only the matter of time to do his part--but with a co-ed, Pellams felt that it was different. She was not a feature of his life. To the woman-hater's mind, if a man has become indebted to a girl, honor bids him pay the debt, the sooner the better. He need never see the girl again, once the score is even. This philosophy evolved, it took another cigarette to decide just how the balance could be struck, and then Pellams went downstairs to wheedle a remnant of breakfast from the indulgent Foo.

Applied to the new element into which he had ventured, something of the keen observation which the Junior devoted to football practice might have made the payment of his debt to Katharine Graham a transaction of less public note. He would have waited, probably, with the brazenness that characterizes local courtship, at the door of the library and caught her as she emerged. Or he would have learned what mails she usually waited for at the post-office and would have lingered until she had opened her box and had started back toward the Quad pretending to look over her correspondence. Or else he would have watched her classes and happened along by accident just as she was coming out for a vacant hour. But these established forms had escaped his notice. Instead, he did what he considered the "proper," and drove dashingly up to Roble in Paulsen's best single rig and his own new fall suit.

Roble caught sight of him beyond the flower beds, over the heads of the tall pampas. The news electrified the dormitory. A Freshman stopped her experimental lab-work with the piano, and joined the others behind the lace at the parlor windows. A group of girls, chatting on the yellow railing of the steps, watched the approach of the apparition. Pellams Chase coming to Roble! Not since the morning Mt. Hamilton was covered with snow had there been such a phenomenon.

"I believe he's coming to take Florence to drive!" said a mischievous Theta Gamma, looking toward Miss Meiggs, who sat frowning at the approaching buggy.

"He ought to," laughed Katharine Graham's roommate, "for not telling her how much red pepper she had put on her rarebit while she was absorbed in talking to him!"

"If he's coming for me," said the Senior grimly, "I shall not disappoint him."

"What!" cried Katharine; "you wouldn't go with him, Florence! Why, we none of us met him until last night."

"Last night I was unfortunately absent-minded," answered Miss Meiggs, "and I did not say all I wanted to. It wouldn't be a pleasant drive!"

"He would have you at his mercy--you shan't go!" laughed another girl, "it would be flying in the face of Providence as well as of Propriety!"

"I can't imagine whom he's coming for," said Katharine, who was sure that he was coming for her. She thought out the severe little refusal she should make him when he had drawn her aside.

The stranger scraped his buggy wheels delicately along the curbing of the Roble walk. The group of girls on the steps was an unexpected ordeal. He caught sight of the amused faces behind the curtains above him and almost lost his nerve.

"Rubber!" he growled. He had made many a clever entrance in the student theatricals, but to-day in climbing out of the buggy he got badly tangled in the reins. In spite of his desperate will, his face was growing red. With painfully fixed gaze he came up the steps toward the Theta Gammas; standing uneasily before them, he blurted out, with no preliminaries whatever:

"Miss Graham, would you like to go driving?"

Katharine straightened and looked at him coolly. One of the girls gave a little gasp at his impertinence.

"It isn't customary, I believe," said Katharine, "to ask to go driving with a girl you have met once, at a supper."

"Isn't it?" faltered Pellams. There was not a vestige of his usual bravado about him. Katharine met his honest gaze, hesitated, then said:

"But I shall be delighted to go, just the same. Will you come in and wait till I get my things?"

They curved round the Dormitory lawn and away toward the La Honda redwoods, leaving the astounded young women on the porch to discuss, as women sometimes do, the peculiar behavior of their departed sister.

She explained it to Pellams during the drive. To his surprise, he learned that he had been hopelessly ill-bred to ask her at all; that had the invitation not been given before the other girls he should have driven away alone. As it was, she was in for no end of criticism. She discouraged any conversation upon the subject of cayenne pepper. Furthermore, she declared herself in full accord with Florence Meiggs as regarded love affairs; she believed in them as little as her elder sister; good-fellowship, without sentiment, was possible and quite sufficient. Pellams, having resolved upon the utmost good-nature during the drive, put the pride of the livery stable through her best paces and allowed his companion to declare her views unquestioned. Toward the end of the afternoon, he deposited her at the Roble door with a pleasant feeling that he had done his duty and was through with co-eds forever.

A wild uproar filled the Rho dining-room when the gallant came in to dinner, late. With an exasperating readiness of conclusion, the crowd congratulated him upon his change of heart, they welcomed to their ranks, with much clinking of water glasses, another true lover, and Smith sang derisively an adaptation of his own:

"Pellams Chase, the Glee Club Man,
Swore upon the book
For wife he'd have a cider-can,
For bed the ingle-nook--
Petticoats he thus forsook!"

Instead of raising the expected storm of denial, Pellams looked guilty and uncomfortable. In spite of their knowledge of the man, they did not divine that their teasing had given him an inspiration.

His idea for a josh involved Miss Graham. So he waited for her deliberately outside the door of the French class next morning; she had stopped to talk to the instructor after the class had left. Jimmy Mason and four or five of the regular Quad loafers were talking football on the curbing. Pellams joined them. Then the gravity of the step he was about to take came over him with a sense of oppression. He felt much as on that Easter morning, years before, when his mother had dragged him out to be confirmed.

"The Berkeley faculty won't let Dudley play," Mason was saying. "He hasn't--where are you speeding in such a rush?" he added and then stopped, paralyzed.

It is probable that if her eyes had not laughed at him with that twinkle of good-fellowship which he had noted on the night of the supper, Pellams never would have had the nerve. That look hauled him over the Rubicon; they went down the arcade together, in the face of Jimmy Mason, the loafers, the whole crowd shifting between lectures. Yet the sun shone as brightly on the palm-circles, the Quadrangle pillars kept their perpendicular. A little later Mason saw the couple sitting under the 'Ninety-five Oak. He whistled to himself with a look that meant: "You wait, old josher till you get into the Knockery again!"

"Now," said Pellams, under the Oak, "you have about the same ideas on love-affairs as I have and you'll sympathize with me in this thing. When I got in to dinner last night, the gang gave me the hottest jolly of my misspent life. They're all alike; they can't understand having a straight friendship for a girl without it's being a puppy-love. So they tumble at once that my driving you means I'm yours for keeps. That sort of a thing makes me tres fatigue and I've a scheme."

"Not your first, is it?"

"In what way do you--"

"I know something of your 'schemes,' young man; that fake fraternity and the snipe-hunts and an examination in English 1 c."

"Oh, those!" Pellams did not blush at the record. Instead, he smiled. His smile was always worth seeing. It was the point of one of his Club stunts. Every muscle got into the interference and his round face grew rosy into the roots of his thick brown hair.

This grin was not lost upon Katharine.

"What am I to do, pray?" asked she; "pose as Professor of Domestic Economy?"

"This is a bird of a josh on the house," he cried. "You'll come in on it, won't you?"

"Plans first, before I commit myself. You might want me to elope in a buggy."

"Never again!" declared Pellams; "my idea is, why can't we pretend to have a case on each other--not any passing fancy, but a real peacherino, like the best of them?"

Somewhat to his surprise, the girl was not visibly enthusiastic.

"Just how do I profit, please, if I butcher myself to make your Roman holiday?"

"You can die happy, knowing we've pulled their le--bluffed 'em beautifully. You're down on love-affairs yourself, you told--"

"Your philosophy of heaven includes a josh on the other fellow, I verily believe," returned Katharine, smiling; "but it is just possible, you know--shall I be very frank?"

"You have been, before!"

"Well, then, I might, you know, prefer the society of some other men in college to the exclusive privilege of yours, even with this wonderful josh thrown in."

"Who, Smith?"

"There are others."

"I know I'm not much of a sq--ladies'-man," he persisted; "but I can learn, can't I?"

"Your manners are not very dreadful when you think about them; but oh, you have lots to master, the little things, you know."

"I let you carry your books this morning--"

"Bravo!--if you only learn to think of them sooner--all the little ways a girl--"

"Sure--you can teach me and rap my knuckles--"

"That would be a pleasure. I've wanted to do it for months."

"And, you see, you'd have the distinction of being the only one I couldn't hold out against."

"Oh, above all things, don't be conceited, or I can't think of it."

"That means you will think of it?"

"You're really not half bad! You caught that on time. Yes, I'll help you in your joke, to punish their silliness, but only for a week, on trial you understand."

Pellams, gratified, put out his hand, not in fashionable wise, but as he would grip a man's. Yet in doing so he noted, looking at her fully for the first time, that the light hair on her temples came down low on the sides, as his mother's did.

On the way up to her room, Miss Graham stood for some moments smiling at an irrelative picture of Westminster Abbey, hanging in the parlor. Having gone driving before their faces, it was more presentable not to be dropped. Also, there was an undeniable pleasure in refuting any of Florence Meiggs's arguments, the one concerning love-affairs and scholarship, for instance. Besides, he was a dear, amusing thing, and a perfect novice.

During the week that followed, Pellams learned a few things. The experiment was by no means a bore. He discovered that it is easier to be joshed than to josh--when you know in your heart you have the joke on the other fellow. He learned the revengefulness of Perkins' nature, old Ted, who was ragged to death when his case on Lillian Arnold developed and who now paid him back with interest. He found how great an object of interest to the co-ed element a man becomes when he is in love. All this was good for the woman-hater, giving him new views of things and teaching him patience. Many times during the ordeal he blessed his dramatic talent. It helped him to pretend a chap when he did not feel it. It served him in assuming an air of "the game is worth the candle," when the whole tableful at the house requoted to him certain scathing remarks on the girl-habit which, in the day of his single blessedness, he had made to each one of them separately. It was more than useful to him when he rolled into the "Knockery," the second evening after his sad condition had become patent, and the assembled company rose to smother him with sofa cushions and lecture him, with decided seriousness, on the evil effect of girling. There were times, indeed, when he didn't have to assume any chap at all, when it came of itself; for example, when the crowd punned on the girl's name, "Graham gems" was a favorite. Somehow, he wished that they wouldn't drag in names that way.

The week ended. He had done beautifully. Looking it over, he was proud of his achievements. Two evenings at the library; a brazen walk every day at the 10.30 period, which both had vacant; a stroll in the moonlit Quad, planned to interest the crowd at the Tuesday evening lecture; two calls at Roble--that was going it pretty heavy. The whole college was smiling at them, and the foolish Rho house hugged itself in the blissful silence of his sarcastic tongue.

This review of the week delighted Pellams. He hunted up Katharine the last afternoon and asked for a renewal of the contract.

She laughed.

"Are you sure you can help the extremes? You know the Quadrangle and the walks in the country--"

"Listen to the Mocking Bird!" gurgled Pellams. He was feeling very well pleased with things in general.

"The product of the means is a bully good josh," he laughed, "and I'm not afraid of the product of the extremes; it's only equal to the same thing--now there's higher mathematics for you!" and Pellams danced the and she made him be serious and take up his work. The first quarter of an hour she called him to order twice--first for trying to trap with a lariat of grass an inquisitive gray lizard spying at them from a fence-rail; second, for enticing into conversation the huge Danish hound, whose bark is so much worse than his bite, and who, having been a pup with the University, knows something of every Stanford "case" ever developed in the pleasant shade of his domain. After fifteen minutes of impeccable behavior, Pellams whispered:

"Say--"

"Silence!"

"Well, I'd like to have some attention paid me. Call me down just to show that you're alive."

She pointed to his History and subsided into her English Poets. When she came to earth again, the sun was low beyond the eucalyptus trees. There was a regular sound near her which she realized having heard for some time in her sub-consciousness. She peeped over the high-growing root between them. The man whom she was helping slept peacefully, his book closed and his mouth open, and only the suspicion of a snore stirring the quiet autumn air.

"I shall never have any trouble with him!" thought Katharine, with just the faintest discontent, as she dropped a twig on his face, by way of waking him without embarrassment.

The autumn rains came and the dry, sniffly dust of the campus lay flat under the quiet air; the clear, fall weather that is mixed in one's mind with the pungent smell of tarweed in the pasture lands, and with long exciting afternoon practices, hung cool over the land, and still Pellams went girling, with his beautiful joke on the college. Katharine's secret joke on him had succeeded equally well. The woman-hater's class work had undergone a transfiguration. People noticed it. At the opening of the term he had put Professor Leyne's course in "Renaissance Poets" on his schedule card, because it was a proclaimed snap and because two of the three Rhos who took it the year before had kept their set-papers. Professor Leyne loved to draw covert allusions from what he called "the ocean of young life that swells around us." One day he threw out a direct allusion. Stopping in his remarks about chivalry, he sunk his voice to an impressive, confidential tone, looking almost directly at the impassive Pellams in the back row.

"And I think sometimes," he said, "when I see the youth feeling the uplifting earnestness of first love--when I see it taking him gently by the hand and saying to him 'my son, there are higher things'; when I see him putting his spirit with new zeal to the tasks that are laid before him, when I see him realizing that life is indeed serious and its end the fulfilment"--and so on until the bell rang, while the subject of the eulogy, outwardly calm, grinned fiendishly in his secret soul, for only himself, the professor and one other knew that he had scored an A on his last two papers as against a D earlier in the year. The professor himself did not know that these same papers were a good part Katharine Graham, who had suggested the ideas to Pellams and had then stood over him while he put them into his own turgid but interesting English.

Similar results ensued in French, which they prepared together, and he so endeared himself to the History professor that that worthy expanded to the point of a hint at an entrance to the seminary the next semester. The superior Miss Meiggs, pondering upon the remarkable change in her classmate, saw with concern this renegade disproving an argument with which she had enlivened many a Theta Gamma meeting. She never guessed with what patience Katharine was training his wandering attention. She was not present during the afternoons of real, quiet study which were forced out of him between luncheon and football practice.

By the time their contract, renewed from week to week, had been operating for two months, Pellams began to wonder just where the point of the joke came in. People had become used to the condition. The House could rely on him and his singing, and girls came oftener than ever to Sunday supper. The Knockery took his affairs as an accepted fact. They no longer had any new jokes on it. Jimmy Mason grumbled now and then because his chum was queening "like all the rest of the frat-men," and their jovial expeditions to Mayfield were over, "because she wouldn't understand" (most conclusive proof!), but he ended by taking it as he might have taken an inequality of temper--as a flaw in character to be overlooked in a friend. Then again, Pellams found it positively uncanny to be getting on so well in his work, an uneasy feeling as though he were walking along the edge of a steep place. As for the joke itself, he could laugh over it with Katharine, but there was no way to spring it. A josh that has not a public end lacks art. He realized that the idea had seemed very rich when he conceived it and that he had plunged into it without considering its finish, and of course an impractical girl wouldn't look so far ahead. Now, he saw that it had ceased to be a josh at all, where other people were concerned.

When he came to the thought of dropping it, he suspected that it was no longer a josh where he himself was concerned. The realization of this quite stunned him, the afternoon it came to him. They were sitting below the Sphinx, at the back of the Mausoleum, and the quail were calling among the pines. Katharine was reading to him from one of his text-books. He heard very little of what she read. To him the book kept repeating that she had the most attractive mouth and chin he had ever noticed; that the low-drawn hair on her forehead was made to be smoothed back, very gently, from her clear skin. The consciousness that he could not give up these study-afternoons came over him with a stab, and told him that he had not been listening at all well lately; that this was why he could not remember the stuff in recitation and why he had not dared to tell her his recent marks. She trusted him so thoroughly now that she did not stop him so often when he talked, instead of working. If she had guessed the real reason of his laziness, she would have been honestly disappointed in him. This was the tragedy of it. He could never let her suspect that he was not still fooling the Rho house. She was a girl entirely without sentimentality--this was what he liked in her at first, and now it was his overthrow. If she should so much as dream that his feeling toward her was anything more than the friendship he had outlined in the beginning, she would shut her book with a slap and declare the compact at an end. He must keep on acting, only his audience had changed and the people he had been joking with were now behind the scenes, though they didn't know it. So he would put his chin in his hand and gaze at her as though the peculiarities of the Renaissance Poets were his greatest concern. He laughed, too, about the joke itself, finding a sort of painful relief in double entendre. Sometimes his mind wandered, and when Katharine failed to reprove him, as in the earlier days of the compact, he felt as though he had betrayed a confidence. Once they had forgotten all about football practice, and it frightened him; but she seemed not to have realized the gravity of the thing, and he laughed the alarming incident away. During lectures, he tried to reason himself out of the predicament. It was entirely possible that this feeling toward her was but another instance of habit, a natural affection for a chum, with some subtle influence of sex combining to frighten him into thinking it more serious. But he was not entirely comforted.

Crises occur properly at the end of a semester. On the evening of Friday, the closing day, Roble gave an impromptu dance. Katharine made Pellams come; it would be final evidence in their joke, since he was known to dislike dances. He agreed to attend, adding his own emphasis to the reason as stated. Katharine filled out his card for him, allowing him three dances with herself. The evening began in misery for the woman-hater, and ended in perturbation of spirit. There were girls, oceans of them, and not one of them had any sense. Katharine was different. These girls didn't know when they were joshed, and they couldn't josh back. They were an uninteresting lot. She had filled his card with them and he had to hunt them up and dredge his head for conversation. It was an awful bore. Katharine was the only girl whom he had ever seemed able to talk with easily, and he had only three little dances with her. He was savage.

During the third dance, he was floundering through an absent-minded conversation with a Freshman girl, whose eyelashes were pale pink, when Cap Smith glided past him, waltzing with Katharine. They looked as though they were having a very good time. Pellams felt that Cap, fine fellow as he was, generally grew too familiar with girls. He noticed with disapproval the man Katharine drew for the fourth dance, and she had Cap again for the fifth. He went over after that dance and asked for her program. Cap was down for two more dances. Pellams gave her back her card. He laughed a joking sentence on another subject, then he slipped down stairs and blundered out into the rainy night in a towering rage at Katharine, at Smith, most of all at himself for being a certain Thing.

Jimmy Mason had not attended the Roble dance. Instead, he sat at his table in the Knockery, going over his accounts as laundry agent. He was deep in these end-of-semester figures when Pellams burst in at the window, like a storm-driven creature. People never stand on ceremony at the Knockery. It is the corner room on the ground floor. The place has always been the Knockery ever since Mason roomed there, just as the big room over the old dining-hall will be the "Bull-pen" forever. It is the universal avenue after the lights are out, and the doors locked. You open the window as gently as you can and slide in. If the tenants are in bed, you get through into the hall on tiptoe, if possible; if awake, you stop and chat a bit by the way of courtesy; no one ever has to study in this enchanted bower. Moreover, if you do not live in the Hall, if you are an Alumnus visitor from town, if there are girls at your frat-house, or if you dwell off the campus and are belated, there are extra blankets under the lounge in the corner. Make up your own bed and turn in, without waking the sleepers. You are not crowding anybody. Once a whole baseball team, with the help of two extra mattresses, slept comfortably in the Knockery--but that is history.

When Pellams slammed in and flopped disconsolately into a chair, Mason looked up, knowing that there was trouble somewhere.

"What is it?" he asked. No answer. Jimmy rose, locked the door and closed the ventilator. Then he disposed himself on the lounge.

"Tell your dad. Is it the girl?"

Pellams's affirmative was put in language unrepeatable in a book for young persons.

"Something gone wrong?"

"Yes," etc.

Jimmy wished to offer consolation. "Can I do anything?"

"Yes," growled the man in a dress suit. "You can give me a sweater and take me to Mayfield!"

Now Jimmy was a true friend. He would have gone anywhere for Pellams.

When the dance music at Roble had ceased, and the quiet of the December night was broken by only the patter of raindrops and the sound of singing in the Mayfield distance, punctuated by sharp whoops, Jimmy had got Pellams back to the Knockery pretty well consoled. It might not have made much difference just then, even if the lover could have known that over in darkened Roble, Katharine Graham, who did not approve of love affairs, lay crying herself to sleep.

Pellams rose late next day, and ate his lunch mournfully at the House. He was in an exaggerated state of repentance and resolve. After luncheon he made a sorrowful pilgrimage to the Quad. Here he learned that he had lost five hours and that the Glee Club would tour the South without him.

Chastened in spirit, he asked for Katharine at Roble. She had gone to Mrs. Stillwell's on the Row. He went again at night, calling late that she might have her packing finished for the morning steamer.

By diplomacy, arranged beforehand with the door-girl, he got her downstairs. There was only a trace of reserve in her manner when she told him that she had all her packing yet to do, and that she couldn't walk about the Quad even once; there was more than a trace of embarrassment about him when he pleaded something very important.

"Perhaps I know what it is," said she.

"More than likely you don't," he persisted; "anyhow, I deserve a chance to explain."

Katharine went down the steps with him.

"Well?" she said, on the walk outside.

"What do you think I want to say?" He was not so brave now.

"The same thing that I have in my mind, that our little arrangement would better end. I have got my very first condition through wasting time on a foolish josh, and I don't believe you've been doing good work lately."

"They gave me two of 'em."

"Indeed? Then Florence Meiggs was right, wasn't she?"

"Dead right."

Silence for awhile, then she said: "But you mustn't blame me. I did my best, and if we both failed it's proof positive that it has to end."

Another pause, with the whirr of distant machinery breaking the stillness. No speech on either side until Pellams felt that he must say something or the blood in his throat would choke him.

"Do--don't you really know what I wanted you out here for?"

"Perhaps to insult me further. Pellams!" impetuously, "why did you do it?"

"What? flunk?"

"No. Cut those dances."

"You ought to know!"

"Yes; I do know, and your wanting to go to Mayfield was a good, gentlemanly excuse, and I ought to accept it, I suppose. Of course, it shouldn't make any difference to me; you have humiliated me enough already, but you might have considered the other girls."

"Yes, and you are blaming me for cutting down there when you and Cap Smith were floating around----"

"You will please leave Mr. Smith out of the conversation;" she turned toward the Hall. "I have to go in, the shades are down already."

Pellams' courage came up with a flash. By blind instinct, he reached out and caught her hand. She did not struggle, though the moment he released his pressure she drew her hand away, and quickened her pace. He followed close, and she turned upon him.

"This is what I might have expected when I cheapened myself with you! Will you let me go in?"

"Not until I have said what I came to say; Katharine, can't you--can't you guess it? Oh, I know--Kathie, you must have seen it--you know why I cut the dance--you know"--and again words failed him and he reached for her hand.

But she put him off this time. "I am sorry to spoil such a beautiful piece of acting; but our arrangement is going to end, and this is a worn-out joke."

They had come by now to the corner of Roble, where it is indiscreet to talk over private affairs, and neither said anything until they reached and mounted the steps into the shadow of the porch. Then she said:

"After all, since it is over, I won't be unkind. Good-bye. We've had a pleasant semester, haven't we?" and this time she gave him her hand.

A girl raised one of the hallway curtains just then. The sudden flash of light came upon Katharine where she stood with her hand in Pellams'. She had meant that look, that softening of the eyes, that little quiver of the mouth, for darkness and concealment, and he caught it all before she could blot it out with a smile.

And, having argued to a conclusion, it mattered not to either that Miss Meiggs stood looking out at them with supreme contempt.

[The end]
Charles Kellogg Field's short story: For The Sake Of Argument

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