ring 'Have you read?' on me
every few seconds, and me coming back with: 'No, I haven't. Ain't it
interesting!' If that's the brand of converse at Prof Frazer's you can
count me out."

Genie laughed. "Think how much more novelty you get out of roasting me
like that than telling Terry he's got 'bats in his belfry' ten or
twelve times a day."

"All right, my son; you win. Maybe I'll go to Frazer's with you.
Sometime."

The Sunday following Carl went to tea at Professor Henry Frazer's.

The house was Platonian without, plain and dumpy, with gingerbread
Gothic on the porch, blistered paint, and the general lines of a
prairie barn, but the living-room was more nearly beautiful than any
room Carl had seen. In accordance with the ideal of that era it had
Mission furniture with large leather cushions, brown wood-work, and
tan oatmeal paper scattered with German color prints, instead of the
patent rockers and carbon prints of Roman monuments which adorned the
houses of the other professors. While waiting with Genie Linderbeck
for the Frazers to come down, Carl found in a rack on the oak table
such books as he had never seen: exquisite books from England, bound
in terra-cotta and olive-green cloth with intricate gold designs,
heavy-looking, but astonishingly light to the hand; books about Celtic
legends and Provencal jongleurs, and Japanese prints and other matters
of which he had never heard; so different from the stained text-books
and the shallow novels by brisk ladies which had constituted his
experiences of literature that he suddenly believed in culture.

Professor Frazer appeared, walking into the room _after_ his fragile
wife and gracious sister-in-law, and Carl drank tea (with lemon
instead of milk in it!) and listened to bewildering talk and to a few
stanzas, heroic or hauntingly musical, by a new poet, W. B. Yeats, an
Irishman associated with a thing called the Gaelic Movement. Professor
Frazer had a funny, easy friendliness; his sister-in-law, a Diana in
brown, respectfully asked Carl about the practicability of motor-cars,
and all of them, including two newly come "high-brow" seniors,
listened with nodding interest while Carl bashfully analyzed each of
the nine cars owned in Plato and Jamaica Mills. At dusk the Diana in
brown played MacDowell, and the light of the silken-shaded lamp was
on a print of a fairy Swiss village.

That evening Carl wrestled with the Turk for one hour,
catch-as-catch-can, on the Turk'