Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 17: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

TUNED OUT. These thoughts passed nimbly through Snoodgy’s mind while the last of the table legs was being removed from his neck. Nor was he wrong. Nine letters from nine irate and badly worried parents addressed to the president of Bramwell University proved Snoodgy’s undoing. He gathered his retorts and his bottles and his what-nots about him and left for the vague section of our vast ter- ritory familiarly known as “ other parts.” He has since become, as I am told, one of the leading scientific lights of our day— somewhere, to put it roughly on a profes- sional basis, around five hundred watts. There was no tenth letter, as Ramier Bellmy is, as is quite right and natural in a hero, an orphan. Unlike the general run of orphans, however, Ramier is neither downtrodden, the victim of relentless and fiendish machinations on the part of cer- tain capitalists, nor poor. I wish he were. It would make the drama of this account much simpler and more thrilling. He pos- sessed a comfortable fortune in gilt-edged bonds that yield him a very un-orphanish income per year. The departure of Professor Kretjz left a bad blank in the lives of Drusilla and Ramier. With the laboratory in temporary ruins, they had no opportunity for pursu- ing their—yes, their pursuit of science. It further meant that there was less reason for their seeing so much of each other, and youth—Cupid alone knows why—when it is in love requires some perfectly definite excuse for contact, no matter how fictitious the excuse may be. They appear to re- quire it as some occult motive for preserv- ing their self-respect. A frigidly polite and awkward discussion that took place between Drusilla and Ra- mier on the campus one spring afternoon toward the close of the last term, quickly put a stop to their impasse. ‘Good afternoon, Miss Duveen,” said Ramier to Drusilla, or words to that effect. “Have you made any further strides in Stock’s ‘ Ultrastrukturchemie ’ since Snood- gy left us on our own?” “None,” said Drusilla formally, and noted that Ramier’s pleasantly stern and not-too-classical-to-be-impossible — features 807 were already covered with their first coat of tan. “No, Mr. Bellmy, I have made no strides at all.” Then she sighed. The sigh, in addition to the ever perennial complications that attend the ushering in of spring, drove all thoughts of the baseball practice to which he had been hastening from Ramier’s head. The space left vacant within it by their departure was at once rented and occupied by a large family of singing birds composed exclusively of night- ingales, who tried their utmost to force their lyric notes to his lips. What he did manage to say, after concentrating an eye as intelligently as possible upon the tip of Drusilla’s enchanting nose, was: “ Well, well! That’s too bad.” And he neither whistled nor sang it, but growled it. “Twas wondering, Mr. Bellmy—I thought that perhaps,” murmured Drusilla, removing an indignant pebble six inches to the left of its lie with the end of an ex- citingly cut sandal, ‘“ if you had a free mo- ment at any time, you. could help me. I simply cannot catch Stock’s allusions to the Periodic System in reference to Dobereiner’s having pointed out the existence of ‘ Triads ’ x ite of course, was a a Drusilla is much too clever a girl to be stumped by anything so simple as a group of three chemically similar elements whose atomic weights—as she told me in strictest confi- dence—are such that one of them is the mean of the other two. On the other hand, she is far too clever a girl to admit it. “ That is perfectly simple,” said Ramier, putting his head eagerly between the steel jaws of the trap and blissfully releasing the catch, “‘ and if you have nothing more press- ing to do we might drop into the Kitchen this evening and talk it over.” CHAPTER Mi. MOSTLY ‘“* CERISE SUPREME.” ~ HE Kitchen is a small shop near the university where the stude can sit with a fairish degree of ‘comfort at round tables and talk while they ruin their stomachs with basic frozen milk devices CoOnmiclboookS.se© ~~