Returning, he got together before him the few Greek authors habitually in hand’s reach, whether handled or not, and from a compartment of his desk took out several sheets of manuscript, metrical translations from favorite passages in the tragedists or the short poems of the Anthology.  Like the rest of the Vaucluse professors—­a mere handful they were,—­he was straitened by the hard exactions of class-room work, and the book which he hoped sometime to publish grew slowly.  How far he was in actual miles from the men who were getting their thoughts into print, how much farther in environment!  Things which to them were the commonplaces of a scholar’s life were to him impossible luxuries; few even of their books found their way to his shelves.  At least the original sources of inspiration were his, and sometimes he felt that his verses were not without spirit, flavor.

He took up a little volume of Theocritus, which opened easily at the Seventh Idyl, and began to read aloud.  Half-way through the poem the door opened and his wife entered.  He did not immediately adjust himself to the interruption, and she remained standing a few moments in the centre of the room.

“Thank you; I believe I will be seated,” she said, the sarcasm in her words carefully excluded from her voice.

He wondered that she should find interest in so sorry a game.  “I thought you felt enough at home in here to sit down without being asked,” he said, rising, and trying to speak lightly.

She took the rocking-chair he brought for her and leaned back in it without speaking.  Her maroon-colored evening gown suggested that whoever planned it had been somewhat straitened by economy, but it did well by her rich complexion and creditable figure.  Her features were creditable too, the dark hair a little too heavy, perhaps, and the expression, defined as it is apt to be when one is thirty-five, not wholly satisfying.  In truth, the countenance, like the gown, suffered a little from economy, a sparseness of the things one loves best in a woman’s face.  Half the sensitiveness belonging to her husband’s eyes and mouth would have made her beautiful.

“It is a pity the Barkers have such a bad night for their party,” Cowart said.

“The reception is at the Fieldings’;” and again he felt himself rebuked.

“I’m afraid I didn’t think much about the matter after you told me the Dillinghams were coming by for you in their carriage.  Fortunately neither family holds us college people to very strict social account.”

“They have their virtues, even if they are so vulgar as to be rich.”

“Why, I believe I had just been thinking, before you came in, that it is only the rich who have any virtues at all.”  He managed to speak genially, but the consciousness that she was waiting for him to make conversation, as she had waited for the chair, stiffened upon him like frost.

He cast about for something to say, but the one interest which he would have preferred to keep to himself was all that presented itself to his grasp.  “I have often thought,” he suggested, “that if only we were in sight of the Gulf, our landscape in early summer might not be very unlike that of ancient Greece.”  She looked at him a little blankly, and he drew one of his books nearer and began turning its leaves.