"It won't? With Hortense scornfully ridiculing it, and Carolyn bursting into tears before she can make her bolt from the room, and Amy wondering whether, after all...! If things are as bad as they are for me up here, how much worse must they be for the rest of them below! And that confounded engagement has made it still worse all round!" Randolph ran his palms over his perplexed temples. "Whose?" "Whose? No wonder you ask! Engagements, then." "When are they going to be married?" "The first week in May, I hear. But Pearson is trying for the middle of April. His flat is taken." Foster writhed in his chair. "Why do they care for him?" he burst out. "He's nothing in himself. And he cares nothing for them. And he cares nothing for you," Foster added boldly. "All he has thought for is that fellow from up north." "Don't ask me why they care," replied Randolph, with studied sobriety. "Why does anybody care? And for what? For the thing that is just out of reach. He's cool; he's selfish; he's indifferent. Yet, somehow, frost and fire join end to end and make the circle complete." He fell into reflection. "It's all like children straining upward for an icicle, and presently slipping, with cracked pates, on the ice below." "Well, _my_ pate isn't cracked." "Unless it's the worst cracked of all." Foster tore off his shade and threw it on the floor. "Mine?" he cried. "Look to your own!" "Joe!" said Randolph, rising. "That won't quite do!" "Be a fool along with the others, if you will!" retorted Foster. "Oh!" he went on, "Haven't I seen it all? Haven't I felt it all? You, Basil Randolph, mind your own ways too!" Randolph thought of words, but held his tongue. Words led to other words, and he might soon find himself involved in what would seem like a defense--an attitude which he did not relish, a course of which he did not acknowledge the need. "Poor Joe!" he thought; "sitting too much by himself and following over-closely the art of putting things together--anyhow!" Joe Foster must have more company and different things to consider. What large standard work--what history, biography, or bulky mass of memoirs in from four to eight volumes--would be the best to begin on before the winter should be too far spent? Four or five days later, Randolph wrote to Cope that there was a good prospect for a small position in the administration offices of the University, and a week later Lemoyne was in that position. Cope, who recognized Randolph's handling of the matter as a personal favor, replied in a tone of some warmth. "He's really a very decent fellow, after all,--of course he is," pronounced Randolph. Lemoyne himself wrote more tardily and more coolly. He was taking time from his Psychology and from "The Antics of Annabella," it appeared, to acquaint himself with the routine of his new position. Randolph shrugged: he must wait to see which of the three interests would be held the most important. 27 _COPE ESCAPES A SNARE_