y
hand.

I kissed the letter again and again before I tore it open ... it was
well that I did it then. I would not have kissed it afterward.

It was filled with stinging rebuke for my presumption ... if I had a
shred of the gentleman in me I would cease troubling her.... I had
caused her exceeding annoyance by my deluge and torrent of absurd
letters ... she did not care for me ... she thought my poetry was bad
... and why had I behaved so brutally toward her former roommate?...

I saw that the homely girl had not been remiss in writing to Vanna about
me....

My reply was a very poetic letter.

"I will trouble you no more," I ended; "but do not destroy my letters
and poems, for, long after your wonderful beauty has become a mere
handful of oblivious dust blowing about the stones of the world, you
will be famous because a great poet loved you ... a poet whom you
unwisely and ignorantly scorned."

* * * * *

Dr. Van Maarden, the Dutch psychiatrist and playwright, author of _De
Kleine Man_, was to come to Laurel to deliver his celebrated lectures on
"The Socialisation of Humanity."...

Professor Dineen, a flabby, feminine little fellow, one of our
professors of philosophy, and hated by the dean of his department
because he was a real philosopher, despite his physical
ludicrousness,--and had published a book which the critics were hailing
as a real contribution to the world of thought--

Dineen had engineered the bringing of the semi-radical Van Maarden to
Laurel....

"For such men are needed here ... to rouse us out of the petty, dogmatic
ways of our crude pioneers...."

"Van Maarden is a remarkable man," continued Dineen; "he writes plays,
poems, books of economic philosophy, novels ... recently he tried to
start a co-operative colony for Dutch farmers in South Carolina, but it
went on the rocks ... and now Van Maarden, for all his genius, is
practically stranded here in America.

"It is, or ought to be, one of the duties of an educational centre like
Laurel, to aid such men ... men who travel about, disseminating ideas,
carrying the torch of inspiration ... like Giordano Bruno, in former
days."

Van Maarden came ... a little, dapper, black-bearded man ... but a very
boy in his enthusiasm. He advanced many doctrines at variance with even
the political radicalism of Kansas.

But whether it was his winning way or his foreign reputation, he was
accepted gravely, and ideas won