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When the dance music at Roble had ceased, and the quiet of the December night was broken by only the patter of raindrops and the sound of singing in the Mayfield distance, punctuated by sharp whoops, Jimmy had got Pellams back to the Knockery pretty well consoled.
The House could rely on him and his singing, and girls came oftener than ever to Sunday supper. The Knockery took his affairs as an accepted fact. They no longer had any new jokes on it. Then again, Pellams found it positively uncanny to be getting on so well in his work, an uneasy feeling as though he were walking along the edge of a steep place.
He was deep in these end-of-semester figures when Pellams burst in at the window, like a storm-driven creature. People never stand on ceremony at the Knockery. It is the corner room on the ground floor. The place has always been the Knockery ever since Mason roomed there, just as the big room over the old dining-hall will be the "Bull-pen" forever.
Jimmie Mason sat in the knockery, with a book cocked up in front of him, and made a pretense of studying, but his thoughts wandered. Finally he threw his work aside altogether, and looked at the little patches of starlight visible between the branches of the tree outside.
Once a whole baseball team, with the help of two extra mattresses, slept comfortably in the Knockery but that is history. When Pellams slammed in and flopped disconsolately into a chair, Mason looked up, knowing that there was trouble somewhere. "What is it?" he asked. No answer. Jimmy rose, locked the door and closed the ventilator. Then he disposed himself on the lounge. "Tell your dad.
He whistled to himself with a look that meant: "You wait, old josher till you get into the Knockery again!" "Now," said Pellams, under the Oak, "you have about the same ideas on love-affairs as I have and you'll sympathize with me in this thing. When I got in to dinner last night, the gang gave me the hottest jolly of my misspent life.
It was more than useful to him when he rolled into the "Knockery," the second evening after his sad condition had become patent, and the assembled company rose to smother him with sofa cushions and lecture him, with decided seriousness, on the evil effect of girling.
He laughed a joking sentence on another subject, then he slipped down stairs and blundered out into the rainy night in a towering rage at Katharine, at Smith, most of all at himself for being a certain Thing. Jimmy Mason had not attended the Roble dance. Instead, he sat at his table in the Knockery, going over his accounts as laundry agent.
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