"Why not, indeed? They collected in a silent little group behind my sofa...." "Puzzled? Awed?" "Fudge! Well, save Thursday." "Is he coming?" "I trust so." "Then they do need a constabulary to keep them quiet?" "Oh, hush!" "How many are you expecting to have? You know I don't enjoy large parties." "Could you stand ten?" "I think so." "Thursday, then," she said, with a definitive hand on the knob of the door. Randolph went down the front walk with a slight stir of elation--a feeling that had come to be an infrequent visitor enough. He hoped that the company would be not only predominantly youthful, but exclusively so--aside from the hostess and himself. And even she often had her young days and her young spots. It would doubtless be clamorous; yet clamor, understood and prepared for, might be met with composure. 6 _COPE DINES--AND TELLS ABOUT IT_ Cope pushed away the last of the themes and put the cork back in the red-ink bottle. Here was a witless girl who seemed to think that Herrick and Cowper were contemporaries. The last sense to develop in the Western void was apparently the sense of chronology--unless, indeed, it were a sense for the shades of difference which served to distinguish between one age and another and provided the raw material that made chronology a matter of consequence at all. "If there were only one more," muttered Cope, looking at the pile of sheets under the gas-globe, "I should probably learn that Chaucer derived from Beaumont and Fletcher." He reached up and jerked the gas-jet to a different angle. The flame lit, through its nicked, pale-pink globe, a bedroom cramped in size and meagre in furnishings: a narrow bed, dressed to look like a lounge; two stiff-backed oak chairs, not lately varnished; a bookshelf overhead, with some dozen of the more indispensable aids to our tongue's literature. The table at which he sat was one of plain deal, covered with some Oriental-seeming fabric which showed here and there inkspots that antedated his own pen. He threw up this covering as it fell over the front edge of the table, pulled out a drawer, laid a sheet of paper in the bettered light, and uncorked a black-ink bottle. "Dear Arthur," he began. He looked across to the other chair, with its broken spindles and obfuscated varnish. With things as he wanted them, his correspondent would be sitting there and letter-writing would be unnecessary. "Dear Arthur," he repeated aloud, and set himself to a general sketch of the new land and the "lay" of it.