"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.