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THE REAL ADVENTURE

A Novel

by

HENRY KITCHELL WEBSTER

Illustrated by R.M. Crosby

Indianapolis
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Publishers
Serial Version 1915
The Ridgway Company
Press of Braunworth & Co.
Bookbinders and Printers
Brooklyn, N.Y.

1916







[Illustration: "We can't talk here," he said. "We must go elsewhere."]




CONTENTS

BOOK I

THE GREAT ILLUSION

CHAPTER

    I A Point of Departure
   II Beginning an Adventure
  III Frederica's Plan and What Happened to It
   IV Rosalind Stanton Doesn't Disappear
    V The Second Encounter
   VI The Big Horse
  VII How It Struck Portia
 VIII Rodney's Experiment
   IX After Breakfast


BOOK II

LOVE AND THE WORLD

    I The Princess Cinderella
   II The First Question and an Answer to It
  III Where Did Rose Come In
   IV Long Circuits and Short
    V Rodney Smiled
   VI The Damascus Road
  VII How the Pattern Was Cut
 VIII A Birthday
   IX A Defeat
    X The Door That Was to Open
   XI An Illustration
  XII What Harriet Did
 XIII Fate Plays a Joke
  XIV The Dam Gives Way
   XV The Only Remedy
  XVI Rose Opens the Door


BOOK III

THE WORLD ALONE

     I The Length of a Thousand Yards
    II The Evening and the Morning Were the First Day
   III Rose Keeps the Path
   IV The Girl With the Bad Voice
    V Mrs. Goldsmith's Taste
   VI A Business Proposition
  VII The End of a Fixed Idea
 VIII Success--and a Recognition
   IX The Man and the Director
    X The Voice of the World
   XI The Short Circuit Again
  XII "I'm All Alone"
 XIII Frederica's Paradox
  XIV The Miry Way
   XV In Flight
  XVI Anti-Climax
 XVII The End of the Tour
XVIII The Conquest of Centropolis


BOOK IV

THE REAL ADVENTURE

    I The Tune Changes
   II A Broken Parallel
  III Friends
   IV Couleur-de-rose
    V The Beginning





BOOK ONE

The Great Illusion



CHAPTER I

A POINT OF DEPARTURE


"Indeed," continued the professor, glancing demurely down at his notes,
"if one were the editor of a column of--er advice to young girls, such
as I believe is to be found, along with the household hints and the
dress patterns, on the ladies' page of most of our newspapers--if one
were the editor of such a column, he might crystallize the remarks I
have been making this morning into a warning--never marry a man with a
passion for principles."

It drew a laugh, of course. Professorial jokes never miss fire. But
_the_ girl didn't laugh. She came to with a start--she had been staring
out the window--and wrote, apparently, the fool thing down in her
note-book. It was the only note she had made in thirty-five minutes.

All of his brilliant exposition of the paradox of Rousseau and
Robespierre (he was giving a course on the French Revolution), the
strange and yet inevitable fact that the softest, most sentimental,
rose-scented religion ever invented, should have produced, through its
most thoroughly infatuated disciple, the ghastliest reign of terror that
ever shocked the world; his masterly character study of the "sea-green
incorruptible," too humane to swat a fly, yet capable of sending half of
France to the guillotine in order that the half that was left might
believe unanimously in the rights of man; all this the girl had let go
by unheard, in favor, apparently, of the drone of a street piano, which
came in through the open window on the prematurely warm March wind. Of
all his philosophizing, there was not a pen-track to mar the virginity
of the page she had opened her note-book to when the lecture began.

And then, with a perfectly serious face, she had written down his silly
little joke about advice to young girls.

There was no reason in the world why she should be The Girl. There were
fifteen or twenty of them in the class along with about as many men.
And, partly because there was no reason for his paying any special
attention to her, it annoyed him frightfully that he did.

She was good-looking, of course--a rather boyishly splendid young
creature of somewhere about twenty, with a heap of hair that had, in
spite of its rather commonplace chestnut color, a sort of electric
vitality about it. She was slightly prognathous, which gave a humorous
lift to her otherwise sensible nose. She had good straight-looking,
expressive eyes, too, and a big, wide, really beautiful mouth, with
square white teeth in it, which, when she smiled or yawned--and she
yawned more luxuriously than any girl who had ever sat in his
classes--exerted a sort of hypnotic effect on him. All that, however,
left unexplained the quality she had of making you, whatever she did,
irresistibly aware of her. And, conversely, unaware of every one else
about her. A bit of campus slang occurred to him as quite literally
applicable to her. She had all the rest of them faded.

It wasn't, apparently, an effect she tried for. He had to acquit her of
that. Not even, perhaps, one that she was conscious of. When she came
early to one of his lectures--it didn't happen often--the men, showed a
practical unanimity in trying to choose seats near by, or at least where
they could see her. But while this didn't distress her at all--they were
welcome to look if they liked--she struck no attitudes for their
benefit. A sort of breezy indifference--he selected that phrase finally
as the best description of her attitude toward all of them, including
himself. When she was late, as she usually was, she slid
unostentatiously into the back row--if possible at the end where she
could look out the window. But for three minutes after she had come in,
he knew he might as well have stopped his lecture and begun reciting the
Greek alphabet. She was, in the professor's mind, the final argument
against coeducation. Her name was Rosalind Stanton, but his impression
was that they called her Rose.

The bell rang out in the corridor. He dismissed the class and began
stacking up his notes. Then:

"Miss Stanton," he said.

She detached herself from the stream that was moving toward the door,
and with a good-humored look of inquiry about her very expressive
eyebrows, came toward him. And then he wished he hadn't called her. She
had spoiled his lecture--a perfectly good lecture--and his impulse had
been to remonstrate with her. But the moment he saw her coming, he knew
he wasn't going to be able to do it. It wasn't her fault that her teeth
had hypnotized him, and her hair tangled his ideas.

"This is an idiotic question," he said, as she paused before his desk,
"but did you get anything at all out of my lecture except my bit of
facetious advice to young girls about to marry?"

She flushed a little (a girl like that hadn't any right to flush; it
ought to be against the college regulations), drew her brows together in
a puzzled sort of way, and then, with her wide, boyish, good-humored
mouth, she smiled.

"I didn't know it was facetious," she said. "It struck me as pretty
good. But--I'm awfully sorry if you thought me inattentive. You see,
mother brought us all up on the Social Contract and The Age of Reason,
things like that, and I didn't put it down because..."

"I see," he said. "I beg your pardon."

She smiled, cheerfully begged his and assured him she'd try to do
better.

Another girl who'd been waiting to speak to the professor, perceiving
that their conversation was at an end, came and stood beside her at the
desk--a scrawny girl with an eager voice, and a question she wanted to
ask about Robespierre; and for some reason or other, Rosalind Stanton's
valedictory smile seemed to include a consciousness of this other
girl--a consciousness of a contrast. It might not have been any more
than that, but somehow, it left the professor feeling that he had given
himself away.

He was particularly polite to the other girl, because his impulse was to
act so very differently.

There is nothing cloistral about the University of Chicago except its
architecture. The presence of a fat abbot, or a lady prioress in the
corridor outside the recitation room would have fitted in admirably with
the look of the warm gray walls and the carven pointed arches of the
window and door casements, the blackened oak of the doors themselves.

On the other hand, the appearance of the person whom Rose found waiting
for her out there, afforded the piquant effect of contrast. Or would
have done so, had the spectacle of him in that very occupation not been
so familiar.

He was a varsity half-back, a gigantic blond young man in a blue serge
suit. He said, "Hello, Rose," and she said, "Hello, Harry." And he
heaved himself erect from the wall he had been leaning against and
reached out an immense hand to absorb the little stack of note-books she
carried. She ignored the gesture, and when he asked for them said she'd
carry them herself. There was a sort of strategic advantage in having
your own note-books under your own arm--a fact which no one appreciated
better than the half-back himself.

He looked a little hurt. "Sore about something?" he asked.

She smiled widely and said, "Not a bit."

"I didn't mean at me necessarily," he explained, and referred to the
fact that the professor had detained her after he had dismissed the
class. "What'd he try to do--call you down?"

There was indignation in the young man's voice--a hint of the protector
aroused--of possible retribution.

She grinned again. "Oh, you needn't go back and kill him," she said.

He blushed to the ears. "I'm sorry," he observed stiltedly, "if I appear
ridiculous." But she went on smiling.

"Don't you care," she said. "Everybody's ridiculous in March. You're
ridiculous, I'm ridiculous, he"--she nodded along the corridor--"he's
plumb ridiculous."

He wasn't wholly appeased. It was rather with an air of resignation that
he held the door for her to go out by. They strolled along in silence
until they rounded the corner of the building. Here, ceremoniously, he
fell back, walked around behind her and came up on the outside. She
glanced up and asked him, incomprehensibly, to walk on the other side,
the way they had been. He wanted to know why. This was where he
belonged.

"You don't belong there," she told him, "if I want you the other way.
And I do."

He heaved a sigh, and said "Women!" under his breath. _Mutabile semper_!
No matter how much you knew about them, they remained