BERTRAM COPE'S YEAR Henry Blake Fuller CONTENTS _1. Cope at a College Tea 2. Cope Makes a Sunday Afternoon Call 3. Cope Is "Entertained" 4. Cope Is Considered 5. Cope Is Considered Further 6. Cope Dines--and Tells About It 7. Cope Under Scrutiny 8. Cope Undertakes an Excursion 9. Cope on the Edge of Things 10. Cope at His House Party 11. Cope Enlivens the Country 12. Cope Amidst Cross-Purposes 13. Cope Dines Again--and Stays After 14. Cope Makes an Evasion 15. Cope Entertains Several Ladies 16. Cope Goes A-Sailing 17. Cope Among Cross-Currents 18. Cope at the Call of Duty 19. Cope Finds Himself Committed 20. Cope Has a Distressful Christmas 21. Cope, Safeguarded, Calls Again 22. Cope Shall Be Rescued 23. Cope Regains His Freedom 24. Cope in Danger Anew 25. Cope in Double Danger 26. Cope as a Go-Between 27. Cope Escapes a Snare 28. Cope Absent From a Wedding 29. Cope Again in the Country 30. Cope as a Hero 31. Cope Gets New Light on His Chum 32. Cope Takes His Degree 33. Cope in a Final View_ AFTERWORD 1 _COPE AT A COLLEGE TEA_ What is a man's best age? Peter Ibbetson, entering dreamland with complete freedom to choose, chose twenty-eight, and kept there. But twenty-eight, for our present purpose, has a drawback: a man of that age, if endowed with ordinary gifts and responsive to ordinary opportunities, is undeniably--a man; whereas what we require here is something just a little short of that. Wanted, in fact, a young male who shall seem fully adult to those who are younger still, and who may even appear the accomplished flower of virility to an idealizing maid or so, yet who shall elicit from the middle-aged the kindly indulgence due a boy. Perhaps you will say that even a man of twenty-eight may seem only a boy to a man of seventy. However, no septuagenarian is to figure in these pages. Our elders will be but in the middle forties and the earlier fifties; and we must find for them an age which may evoke their friendly interest, and yet be likely to call forth, besides that, their sympathy and their longing admiration, and later their tolerance, their patience, and even their forgiveness. I think, then, that Bertram Cope, when he began to intrigue the little group which dwelt among the quadruple avenues of elms that led to the campus in Churchton, was but about twenty-four,--certainly not a day more than twenty-five. If twenty-eight is the ideal age, the best is all the better for being just a little ahead.