Description
Bertram Cope’s Year
1
COPE AT A COLLEGE TEA
What is a man’s best age? Peter Ibbetson, entering dreamland with
complete freedom to choose, chose twenty-eight, and kept there. But
twenty-eight, for our present purpose, has a drawback: a man of that
age, if endowed with ordinary gifts and responsive to ordinary
opportunities, is undeniably–a man; whereas what we require here is
something just a little short of that. Wanted, in fact, a young male
who shall seem fully adult to those who are younger still, and who may
even appear the accomplished flower of virility to an idealizing maid
or so, yet who shall elicit from the middle-aged the kindly indulgence
due a boy. Perhaps you will say that even a man of twenty-eight may
seem only a boy to a man of seventy. However, no septuagenarian is to
figure in these pages. Our elders will be but in the middle forties and
the earlier fifties; and we must find for them an age which may evoke
their friendly interest, and yet be likely to call forth, besides that,
their sympathy and their longing admiration, and later their tolerance,
their patience, and even their forgiveness.
I think, then, that Bertram Cope, when he began to intrigue the little
group which dwelt among the quadruple avenues of elms that led to the
campus in Churchton, was but about twenty-four,–certainly not a day
more than twenty-five. If twenty-eight is the ideal age, the best is
all the better for being just a little ahead.
Of course Cope was not an undergraduate–a species upon which many of
the Churchtonians languidly refused to bestow their regard. “They come,
and they go,” said these prosperous and comfortable burghers; “and,
after all, they’re more or less alike, and more or less unrewarding.”
Besides, the Bigger Town, with a