“I didn’t know it was facetious,” she said.  “It struck me as pretty good.  But—­I’m awfully sorry if you thought me inattentive.  You see, mother brought us all up on the Social Contract and The Age of Reason, things like that, and I didn’t put it down because ...”

“I see,” he said.  “I beg your pardon.”

She smiled, cheerfully begged his and assured him she’d try to do better.

Another girl who’d been waiting to speak to the professor, perceiving that their conversation was at an end, came and stood beside her at the desk—­a scrawny girl with an eager voice, and a question she wanted to ask about Robespierre; and for some reason or other, Rosalind Stanton’s valedictory smile seemed to include a consciousness of this other girl—­a consciousness of a contrast.  It might not have been any more than that, but somehow, it left the professor feeling that he had given himself away.

He was particularly polite to the other girl, because his impulse was to act so very differently.

There is nothing cloistral about the University of Chicago except its architecture.  The presence of a fat abbot, or a lady prioress in the corridor outside the recitation room would have fitted in admirably with the look of the warm gray walls and the carven pointed arches of the window and door casements, the blackened oak of the doors themselves.

On the other hand, the appearance of the person whom Rose found waiting for her out there, afforded the piquant effect of contrast.  Or would have done so, had the spectacle of him in that very occupation not been so familiar.

He was a varsity half-back, a gigantic blond young man in a blue serge suit.  He said, “Hello, Rose,” and she said, “Hello, Harry.”  And he heaved himself erect from the wall he had been leaning against and reached out an immense hand to absorb the little stack of note-books she carried.  She ignored the gesture, and when he asked for them said she’d carry them herself.  There was a sort of strategic advantage in having your own note-books under your own arm—­a fact which no one appreciated better than the half-back himself.

He looked a little hurt.  “Sore about something?” he asked.

She smiled widely and said, “Not a bit.”

“I didn’t mean at me necessarily,” he explained, and referred to the fact that the professor had detained her after he had dismissed the class.  “What’d he try to do—­call you down?”

There was indignation in the young man’s voice—­a hint of the protector aroused—­of possible retribution.

She grinned again.  “Oh, you needn’t go back and kill him,” she said.

He blushed to the ears.  “I’m sorry,” he observed stiltedly, “if I appear ridiculous.”  But she went on smiling.

“Don’t you care,” she said.  “Everybody’s ridiculous in March.  You’re ridiculous, I’m ridiculous, he”—­she nodded along the corridor—­“he’s plumb ridiculous.”