"Once in a while I do," said Magnus. "Not always. Maybe I do a little boning in math. Maybe I take a walk with the nicest girl there is round."
"Can you always get the nicest?" she said.
"Oh, yes!" Magnus answered easily; "unless she happens to be somebody else's best. Sometimes then. You see, so long as she doesn't look me in the face, she can fancy I am her 'best' man."
"Why, Magnus!" his mother said, half laughing now, but really anxious; "how do you behave, to make that possible?"
"Sure enough," he said, "how do I? Maybe I go through the motions."
And now it was Mrs. Kindred who, after a moment's pause, changed the subject.
"Look, dear," she said, laying her hand on the open Bible, "I was reading just here: the parable of the sower. And my thoughts had been going back and forth from the seed which the fowls of the air were let pick up, to that other which fell in an honest and good heart, and 'with patience,' brought forth an hundred-fold."
"There are lots of fowls of the air at the Academy," he said.
"Maybe no more than elsewhere. But they have no business in _your_ life, Magnus."
"No, mammy, they haven't," he said, hesitating a little with the difficulty of making his case plain. "All the same, they come in. I'll go to a right down good prayer-meeting Sunday night, and come back meaning to be the joy of your heart from that time on. Think I'll go straight to bed, so as to be sure and keep good till morning. Well, the moon is coming up as I get back to camp, and there is Randolph with pink and white gowns in tow; and I stop to speak, and they all say: 'Oh, come for a little walk!' I don't want to, and I half turn away--and then I go. The prayer-meeting isn't all gone by the time I get back, but there has been more of it picked up than you'd like."
"Yes," the mother answered, thinking in her heart that she had not prayed half enough for her boy in his hard places.
"Why, I've seen a man stay to Communion," Magnus went on, "and when we came out, there was Pretty Newcomb waiting for him in the rain, at the foot of the Chapel steps. Just walked him off alongside of her umbrella--or under it. And what are you going to do?"
"I see. But, Magnus, you said 'Sunday' night. What sort of girls are at the Camp Sunday night?"