I was sorry I had not procured Vanna’s address before I had betrayed myself.  But, anyhow, I wrote her a long letter and sent it in care of the university registrar.

Flamboyantly I confessed my love ... rehearsed the story of my worship of her from afar....

For a month, every day, I sent her a bulky envelope full of mad verse and declarations of undying love.  As the letters were not being returned, she must be receiving them.

One morning, with trembling hands and a pounding heart that nearly bore me down, it acted so like a battering ram on the inside, I drew a delicately scented envelope from my mailbox ... addressed in a dainty hand.

I kissed the letter again and again before I tore it open ... it was well that I did it then.  I would not have kissed it afterward.

It was filled with stinging rebuke for my presumption ... if I had a shred of the gentleman in me I would cease troubling her....  I had caused her exceeding annoyance by my deluge and torrent of absurd letters ... she did not care for me ... she thought my poetry was bad ... and why had I behaved so brutally toward her former roommate?...

I saw that the homely girl had not been remiss in writing to Vanna about me....

My reply was a very poetic letter.

“I will trouble you no more,” I ended; “but do not destroy my letters and poems, for, long after your wonderful beauty has become a mere handful of oblivious dust blowing about the stones of the world, you will be famous because a great poet loved you ... a poet whom you unwisely and ignorantly scorned.”

* * * * *

Dr. Van Maarden, the Dutch psychiatrist and playwright, author of De Kleine Man, was to come to Laurel to deliver his celebrated lectures on “The Socialisation of Humanity."...

Professor Dineen, a flabby, feminine little fellow, one of our professors of philosophy, and hated by the dean of his department because he was a real philosopher, despite his physical ludicrousness,—­and had published a book which the critics were hailing as a real contribution to the world of thought—­

Dineen had engineered the bringing of the semi-radical Van Maarden to Laurel....

“For such men are needed here ... to rouse us out of the petty, dogmatic ways of our crude pioneers....”

“Van Maarden is a remarkable man,” continued Dineen; “he writes plays, poems, books of economic philosophy, novels ... recently he tried to start a co-operative colony for Dutch farmers in South Carolina, but it went on the rocks ... and now Van Maarden, for all his genius, is practically stranded here in America.

“It is, or ought to be, one of the duties of an educational centre like Laurel, to aid such men ... men who travel about, disseminating ideas, carrying the torch of inspiration ... like Giordano Bruno, in former days.”

Van Maarden came ... a little, dapper, black-bearded man ... but a very boy in his enthusiasm.  He advanced many doctrines at variance with even the political radicalism of Kansas.