'
After that Ordinsky was friendly to me, and behaved as if there were some
deep understanding between us. He wrote a furious article, attacking the
musical taste of the town, and asked me to do him a great service by taking
it to the editor of the morning paper. If the editor refused to print it,
I was to tell him that he would be answerable to Ordinsky `in person.' He
declared that he would never retract one word, and that he was quite
prepared to lose all his pupils. In spite of the fact that nobody ever
mentioned his article to him after it appeared--full of typographical
errors which he thought intentional--he got a certain satisfaction from
believing that the citizens of Lincoln had meekly accepted the epithet
`coarse barbarians.' `You see how it is,' he said to me, `where there is no
chivalry, there is no amour-propre.' When I met him on his rounds now, I
thought he carried his head more disdainfully than ever, and strode up the
steps of front porches and rang doorbells with more assurance. He told
Lena he would never forget how I had stood by him when he was `under
fire.'
All this time, of course, I was drifting. Lena had broken up my serious
mood. I wasn't interested in my classes. I played with Lena and Prince, I
played with the Pole, I went buggy-riding with the old colonel, who had
taken a fancy to me and used to talk to me about Lena and the `great
beauties' he had known in his youth.
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