ew youth had come to
her. She took fifteen years off her looks by simply fluffing her hair
out of its professorial constriction. Professor Mackail noticed it and
mentioned to Professor Litton that Professor Binley was looking ever so
much better.

"She's not half homely for such an old maid!" he said.

Professor Litton felt murder in his heart. He wanted to slay the
reprobate twice--once for daring to observe Martha's beauty and once for
his parsimony of praise.

That evening when he called on Martha he was tortured with a sullen
mood. She finally coaxed from him the astounding admission that he
suspected her of flirting with Mackail. She was too new in love to
recognize the ultimate compliment of his distress. She was horrified by
his distrust, and so hurt that she broke forth in a storm of tears and
denunciation. Their precious evening ended in a priceless quarrel of
amazing violence. He stamped down the outer steps as she stamped up the
inner.

For three days they did not meet and the university wore almost visible
mourning for its pets. Poor Litton had not known that the human heart
could suffer such agony. He was fairly burned alive with loneliness and
resentment--like another Hercules blistering in the shirt of Nessus. And
Martha was suffering likewise as Jason's second wife was consumed in
the terrible poisoned robe that Medea sent her.

One evening a hollow-eyed Litton crept up the dormitory steps and asked
the overjoyed maid for Professor Binley. When she appeared he caught her
in his arms as if she were a spar and he a drowning sailor. They made up
like young lovers and swore oaths that they would never quarrel
again--oaths which, fortunately for the variety of their future
existence, they found capable of infinite breaking and mending.

Each denied that the other could possibly love each. He decried himself
as a stupid, ugly old fogy; and she cried him up as the wisest and most
beautiful and best of men. Since best sounded rather weak, she called
him the bestest; and he did not charge the impossible word against her
as he had against Teed. He did not remember that Teed had ever used such
language. Nobody could ever have used such language, because nobody was
ever like her!

And when she said that he could not possibly love a homely, scrawny old
maid like her, he delivered a eulogy that would have struck Aphrodite,
rising milkily from the sea, as a slight exaggeration. And as for old
maid, he cried in