But once caught in the mesh of his own net, Professor Krenner was game. He put Nan down before him in the classroom, where the boards were for the most part covered with mathematical problems, and began to talk seriously, but in a popular strain, of form, color, and periods of architecture.
He was interested himself and he interested Nan. She took fire from his enthusiasm. He went to the board and illustrated his meaning with bold, rapid strokes of the chalk. He even erased problems and examples, in his eagerness to explain to an intelligent, youthful mind, ideas that he had long since evolved but had not put into words before.
"Hoity-toity!" he cried at last, in his odd, querulous way. "I've rubbed out half my work for to-morrow. Nancy Sherwood, you've bewitched me. You've set me talking on a theme I don't often touch. Now, are you satisfied?"
"I'm beginning to be just awfully interested," Nan declared, rising with a sigh. "Is the lesson over?"
"Ah! 'tis over," he growled, looking ruefully at his free-hand elevation of the Colosseum at Rome.
"Eh? And do you wish to continue this course?"
"I truly believe I'd like to see if I have a talent for architecture. I'm awfully interested. It's lots more entertaining than drawing butterflies and flowers. Can't a woman be an architect?"
"Hoity-toity! what's this?" asked the professor, and sat down again to stare at her.
"I really do like it, Professor," repeated Nan.
And from that time there dated a friendship between, and companionship of, Nan Sherwood and Professor Krenner that really made a great difference in both their lives.
Just now both chums from Tillbury were, immensely interested in the secret banquet to which twenty-five of their closest friends were to be invited. Nor was it a small task to select those two score and five out of a possible hundred--for, of course, the "primes," or lower-grade girls, were not considered at all.
And then, there was the possibility of some of the invited guests being unwilling to attend. They had to face that from the start.
"You know very well," said Bess, when she had digested Nan's idea for a day or two, and grown more accustomed to it--"You know very well that wild horses wouldn't drag May Winslow to the feast."