I.

“I am going,” said the professor to his friend Miss Eldridge, “to marry a young woman whose mind I can mould.”

Somebody was uncharitable enough to say that he couldn’t possibly make it any mouldier than his own.  This was a slander.  In the high dry Greek atmosphere which surrounded and enclosed his mind, mould, which requires dampness before it can exist, was an impossibility.

When an engagement is announced, it is almost invariably followed by one question, with a variable termination.  The dear five hundred friends exclaim, with uplifted hands,—­

“What could have possessed him,” or “her”?

In the present case the latter termination was adopted, with but one dissenting voice:  Miss Christina Eldridge said, in low, shocked tones, “Alas that a man of his simply colossal mind should have been ensnared by a pretty face, whose soulless beauty will depart in a few short years!”

The professor would have been very indignant had any one ventured to suggest to him that the pretty face had anything to do with it.  He imagined himself entirely above and beyond such flimsy considerations.  Yet it is sadly doubtful whether an example in long division, on a smeared slate, brought to him with tears and faltering accents by Miss Christina, would have produced the effect which followed when Miss Rosamond May betrayed her shameful ignorance by handing him the slate and saying forlornly, “I’ve done it seven times, and it comes out differently wrong every time.  Can you see what’s the matter?” and two wet blue eyes looked into his through his spectacles, with an expression which said plainly, “You are my last and only hope.”

She was standing by the massive marble-topped table which was the central feature of the parlor of their boarding-house.  One plump hand—­with dimples where the knuckles should have been—­rested upon the unresponsive marble, in the other she held the slate.  She was a teacher of some of the lowest classes in Miss Christina Eldridge’s academy for young ladies, and only Miss Christina knew the almost fathomless depths of her ignorance.

But her father had been a professor, and a widower; and shortly before he died he had manifested an appreciation of the stately principal which, but for his untimely death,—­he was only seventy,—­might have expanded into “that perfect union of souls” for which her disciplined heart secretly pined.

So when it was first whispered, and then exclaimed, that Professor May had left nothing, absolutely nothing, for his daughter but a very small life-insurance premium and the furniture of their rented house, with a little old-fashioned jewelry and silverware of the smallest possible intrinsic value, Miss Christina called upon Miss May and told her that, if she would accept it, there was a vacancy in the academy, with a salary of two hundred dollars a year and board, but not lodging.