The Professors House
cepted—when was a professor known to refuse a
good dinner? Rosamond was presented with her
emeralds, and, as St. Peter afterward observed to
his wife, practically all the guests in the dining-room were participants in the happy event. Lillian was doubtless right when she told him that, all the same,
his fellow professors went away from the Blackstone that night respecting Godfrey St. Peter more than they had ever done before, and if they had marriageable daughters, they were certainly envying him his luck.
“That,” her husband replied, “is my chief objection to public magnificence; it seems to show everybody up in the worst possible light. I’m not finding fault with anyone but myself, understand. When I consented to occupy an apartment I couldn’t afford, I let myself in for whatever might follow.”
They got back to Hamilton in bitter weather. The lake winds were scourging the town, and Scott had laryngitis and was writing prose poems about the pleasures of tending your own furnace when the thermometer is twenty below.
“Godfrey,” said Mrs. St. Peter when he set off for his class-room on the morning after their return, “surely you’re not going to the old house this afternoon. It will be like a refrigerating-plant. There’s no way of heating your study except by that miserable little stove.”
—96—
