Chapter VI
Cope Dines—and Tells About It
Cope pushed away the last of the themes and put the cork back in the red-ink bottle. Here was a witless girl who seemed to think that Herrick and Cowper were contemporaries. The last sense to develop in the Western void was apparently the sense of chronology—unless, indeed, it were a sense for the shades of difference which served to distinguish between one age and another and provided the raw material that made chronology a matter of consequence at all.
"If there were only one more," muttered Cope, looking at the pile of sheets under the gas-globe, "I should probably learn that Chaucer derived from Beaumont and Fletcher."
He reached up and jerked the gas-jet to a different angle. The flame lit, through its nicked, pale-pink globe, a bedroom cramped in size and meagre in furnishings: a narrow bed, dressed to look like a lounge; two stiff-backed oak chairs, not lately varnished; a bookshelf overhead, with some dozen of the more in-dispensable aids to our tongue's literature. The table at which he sat was one of plain deal, covered with some Oriental-seeming fabric which showed here and there inkspots that antedated his own pen. He threw
up this covering as it fell over the front edge of the
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