"They are all old--five hundred years and more. He was a pal of Chaucer's." She gave him an indignant glance. "So that's it? You're laying traps for me? You don't like me! You don't respect me!" One of the recalcitrant cushions fell to the floor. They bumped heads in trying to pick it up. "Traps!" he said. "Never in the world! Don't think it! Why, Gower is just a necessary old bore. Nobody's supposed to know much about him--except instructors and their hapless students." He added one more sentence to his letter to "Arthur": "She pushes you pretty hard. A little of it goes a good way..." "Oh, if _that's_ the case..." she said. "How about your thesis?" she went on swiftly. "What are you going to write about?" "I was thinking of Shakespeare." "Shakespeare! There you go again! Ridiculing me to my very face!" "Not at all. There's lots to say about him--or them." "Oh, you believe in Bacon!" "Not at all--once more. I should like to take a year and spend it among the manor-houses of Warwickshire. But I suppose nobody would stake me to that." "I don't know what you have in mind; some wild goose chase, probably. I expect your friends would like it better if you spent your time right here." "Probably. I presume I shall end by doing a thesis on the 'color-words' in Keats and Shelley. A penniless devil has no luck." "Anybody has luck who can form the right circle. Stay where you are. A circle formed here would do you much more good than a temporary one four thousand miles away." Voices were heard in the front yard. "There they come, now," Mrs. Phillips said. She rose, and one more of the wayward cushions went to the floor. It lay there unregarded,--a sign that a promising tête-à-tête was, for the time being, over. 3 _COPE IS "ENTERTAINED"_ Mrs. Phillips stepped to the front door to meet the half dozen young people who were cheerily coming up the walk. Cope, looking at the fallen cushions with an unseeing eye, remained within the drawing-room door to compose a further paragraph for the behoof of his correspondent in Wisconsin: "Several girls helped entertain me. They came on as thick as spatter. One played a few things on the violin. Another set up her easel and painted a picture for us. A third wrote a poem and read it to us. And a few sophomores hung about in the background. It was all rather too much. I found myself preferring those hours together in dear old Winnebago...." Only one of the sophomores--if the young men were really of that objectionable tribe--came indoors with the young ladies. The others--either engaged elsewhere or consciously unworthy--went away after a moment or two on the front steps. Perhaps they did not feel "encouraged." And in fact Mrs. Phillips looked back toward Cope with the effect of communicating the idea that she had enough men for to-day. She even conveyed to him the notion that he had made the others superfluous. But--