"How could you think I should ever forget the pleasant month I spent in your mother's house?" she returned. "We do not have so many pleasant months in life, do we, that we can afford to let any one of them slip out of memory? You haven't forgotten me, have you? Well, then, why should I forget you and your mother and the lovely little college town?" "That month I can't forget," he responded; "but it was a long while ago, and my existence is uneventful always, while yours is full--and then so many things have happened since." "Yes," she admitted, "so many things have happened. I'm married, for one thing. But that hasn't made me forget how kind you all were to me. Can't you sit down here for a few minutes and give me all the news of the college and the town?" "I shall be only too glad," he said, taking the chair by her side. "Where shall I begin?" "Tell me about yourself," she commanded. "That won't take me long," he returned. "Very little has happened to me. I was going to Germany--perhaps you remember--that fall, after you left us. Well, I went, and I stayed two years, and I took my Ph.D. there, and I came back to the old college, and they gave me a professorship--and that's all." "That's enough, I think," she answered, looking at him frankly with her dark eyes. "You have your work to do, and you do it. I don't believe there is anything better in life than to be sure what you ought to work at and to be able to work at it." "I suppose you are right," Morton acknowledged. "I find hard labor is often the best fun, after all. But I can get solid enjoyment out of loafing, too. I don't recall that we worked very steadily that month that you were with us, and we certainly had a very good time. At least I did!" "And so did I," she declared, unbending a little, and with a laugh of pleasant recollection. "I enjoyed every minute of my visit. I wish I could have such good times now!" "Don't you?" he asked. "Not often," she answered. "Perhaps never." "You surprise me," he replied. "I supposed you were being entertained by day and by night, week in and week out, from one year's end to another." "So we are," she explained. "But being entertained isn't always being interested, is it?" "That's the theory, isn't it?" he rejoined. "It may be the theory," she confessed, "but I'm sure it isn't the practice." "I know that little college town of ours is remote from the path of progress," he went on, "but sometimes we behold those messengers of civilization, the New York Sunday newspapers. And whenever I do get one I am certain to see that you have been to a dinner-dance here, to a _bal poudre_ there. I should judge that you lived in an endless merry-go-round of gayety." She smiled again, and there was no sadness in her smile, only a vague, detached weariness. "Dinner-dances are the fashion just now," she said; "and if there is anything more absurd than the fashion it's to waste one's strength struggling against it."