Miss Potterman again laid her hand on his arm.
She stayed but half an hour. The door closed. The birds fled from the windows and the daffodils retired under the carpet.
Skippy fell back on a chair and fanned himself.
"What's the use?" he said disconsolately.
"Women are our inferiors," said Snorky wickedly.
"Woman!" said Skippy rousing himself indignantly. "You don't call that a woman! That's Maude Adams and Lorna Doone and--and the Gibson Girl rolled into one!"
"Don't blame you," said Snorky heavily. "It ain't right to let anything as wonderful as that roam around loose. Skippy, it's all wrong."
"Well," said Snorky reflectively, "she turned up in time. We'd have had Nuisance ready for the undertaker by the morning."
"My hands are tied," said Skippy glumly. "I've promised."
"Me too, but how are we going to stick it out?"
"Well, we'll have to treat Nuisance with moral influences," said Skippy thoughtfully. "It will be longer, longer and harder."
They dined with Miss Potterman at the Inn and that and a walk about the campus under the stars completed the devastation. Before it was over Skippy actually heard himself called "Jack," had shaken hands on an eternal friendship, promised to write from time to time of Hippo's progress and needs, agreed to defend him from bodily injury and promised to accompany him home for the short Thanksgiving recess. The final touch came when Miss Potterman sought to press upon him a large bill in case Hippo should be perishing of thirst or hunger.
Skippy put it away. It hurt to do so, it choked him, but he did it.
"Not from you--I couldn't," he said huskily. "I--well, I just couldn't."
That night as he stood at his bureau and looked into the eyes of the past, at Mimi and Dolly and Jennie and Vivi the hunter of scalps, he spoke.
"Do you know the feeling after you've been dabbling with six-inch and five-inch and four-inch trout all day,--and something about three feet long weighing ten or twelve pounds grabs your hook? Do you get me?"
"Sure, I get you," said Snorky gazing heavily out at the stars, "but oh gee, Skippy, why does she have to be Nuisance's sister?"
Snorky's worst forebodings were realized. Nuisance earned his title a hundredfold within the week. Dennis de Brian de Boru Finnegan had been fresh, was fresh and would freshen more, but Dennis was amusing and added to the gayety of nations. Nuisance was what his name implied, simply intolerable. You stumbled over him and you bumped into him. When state secrets were being discussed in whispers, Nuisance was always within earshot. He was the extra, the intruder, the tail to the kite. He did not actively offend against the traditions which govern freshmen in the incubator period. He was too clever for that. He had submitted to the mild hazing with a cheerfulness which robbed it of all its sting. He had climbed water towers and sung appropriate hymns. He had sat in washbasins and gravely pulled imaginary miles against the toothpicks furnished him as oars. He had submitted to the pi's as they came with a full recognition that the second and third men in the mounting heap were extremely more uncomfortable than himself with a mattress for a vis-à-vis. He was not insubordinate--he was just a nuisance.