a curious blending of puerility and scholasticism:

"Old maid, do you say? And has my little Margy-wargles forgotten what
Sappho said of an old maid? We'd have lost it if some old scholiast on
the stupid old sophist Hermogenes hadn't happened to quote it to
explain the word glukumalon--an apple grafted on a quince. Sappho said
this old maid was like--let me see!--'like the sweet apple that blushes
on the top of the bough--on the tip of the topmost; and the
apple-gatherers forgot it--no, they did not forget it; they just could
not get it!' And that's you, Moggles mine! You're an old maid because
you've been out of reach of everybody. I can't climb to you; so you're
going to drop into my arms--aren't you?"

She said she supposed she was. And she did.

Triumphantly he said, "Hadn't we better announce our engagement?"

This threw her into a spasm of fear. "Oh, not yet! Not yet! I'm afraid
to let the students all know it. A little later--on Commencement Day
will be time enough."

He bowed to her decision--not for the last time.

For a time Litton had taken pleasure in employing his learning in the
service of Martha's beauty. He called her classic names--_Meae Deliciae_,
or _Glukutate_, or _Melema_. A poem that he had always thought the last
word in silliness became a modest expression of his own emotions--the
poem in which Catallus begs Lesbia, "Give me a thousand kisses, then a
hundred, then a thousand more, then a second hundred; then, when we have
made up thousands galore, we shall mix them up so that we shall not
know--nor any enemy be able to cast a spell because he knows--how many
kisses there are."

His scholarship began to weary her, however, and it began to seem an
affectation to him; so that he was soon mangling the English language in
speech and in the frequent notes he found it necessary to send his idol
on infinitely unimportant matters that could not wait from after lunch
to after dinner.

She coined phrases for him, too, and his heart rejoiced when she
achieved the epoch-making revision of Stuart into Stookie-tookie! He had
thought that Toodie was wonderful, but it was a mere stepping-stone to
Stookie-tookie.

Her babble ran through his head like music, and it softened his heart,
so that almost nothing could bring him to earth except the recitations
of Teed, who crashed through the classics like a bull in a china-shop
or, as Litton's Greeks put it, like an ass among beehives.

During those black d