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Churchton itself was no nest of antiquities; in 1840 it had consisted merely of a log tavern on the Green Bay road, and the first white child born within its limits had died but recently. Nor was the Big Town just across the "Indian Boundary" much older. There was a Ghetto, there was a Little Italy, there were bits of Bulgaria, Bohemia, Armenia, if one had tired of dubious Louis Quinze and Empire.
Well, all right; I never resent a friendly interest. He sat in a less-easy chair and blew his smoke-rings and wondered if I had been a small-town boy. 'I'm one, too, he said; at least Churchton, forty years at least Churchton, thirty years ago, was not all it is to-day. It has always had its own special tone, of course; but in my young in my younger days it was just a large country village.
She made, almost unconsciously, the allowance that is still generally made, among Americans, for the difference between two generations: the elder, of course, continues to provide a staid, sober, and somewhat primitive background for the brilliancy of the younger. Her own people, if they appeared in Churchton, might seem a bit simple and provincial too.
And there was wine. "I think I can have just one kind, for once," she had said to herself. "I know several houses where they have two, Churchton or not, and at least one where they sometimes have three. If this simple town thinks I can put grape-juice and Apollinaris before such people as these...." Besides, the interesting Cope might interestingly refuse!
On Friday, at half past eleven, Randolph at his office in the city, received a long-distance call from Churchton. Cope announced, with a breathless particularity not altogether disassociated from self-conscious gaucherie, that he should be unable to go.
Amy reached Churchton first, and it soon transpired through the house in which she lived that she was engaged to Bertram Cope. Cope, returning two days later, with Lemoyne, found his new status an open book to the world or to such a small corner of the world as cared to read.
Churchton lived much of its real life beyond its own limits, and the student who came to be entertained socially within them was the exception indeed. No, Bertram Cope was not an undergraduate. He was an instructor; and he was working along, in a leisurely way, to a degree. He expected to be an M.A., or even a Ph.D. Possibly a Litt.D. might be within the gift of later years.
"I hope she won't tell them again how I came to the rescue," said Cope. "It makes a man feel too flat for words. Anybody might think, to hear her go on, that I had saved you all from robbery and murder...." "Why, but didn't you?" inquired Carolyn seriously. Cope had the luck to get back to Churchton with little further in the way of homage.
If Amy had but been rescued by him, George F. Pearson, instead of by this Bertram Cope, and if she had been snatched from a disorderly set of breakers at the foot of those disheveled sandhills instead of from the prim, prosy, domestic edge of Churchton well, wouldn't the affair have been better set and better carried off?
In an atmosphere of general newness a thing did not need to be very old to be an antique. The least old of all things in Randolph's world were the students who flooded Churchton. There were two or three thousand of them, and hundreds of new ones came with every September. Sometimes he felt prompted to "collect" them, as contrasts to his older curios.
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