: A matter of size by Mines Samuel - Science fiction; Short stories; Mate selection Fiction; College teachers Fiction; Experiments Fiction; Physicists Fiction

@FreeBooksThu 08 Jun, 2023

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A MATTER OF SIZE

Professor Hiram Dexter put the finishing touches on his toilet by tenderly brushing out his crisp, black Vandyke beard. He stepped back to look at himself in the mirror. He had to stoop a little for even the full-length glass was short for his six feet four inches of gangling height. Nevertheless he regarded his image with undiluted satisfaction.

"Ah, Dexter," he sighed, "you're a dashing rascal."

Humming tunelessly, for he was quite tone-deaf, he picked up a book titled, "The Nutritive Quotient, Vitamin Factors And Trace Elements of Protein-High Diets," put his hat on, the light out, and left the house.

Outside, a spring night hovered tenderly over the campus of Fredonia College. The darkness was alive with the richness of new grass, the vagrant perfumes of verbena, alyssum, calendula, nemophila and ageratum, not to mention lobelia, mignonette, nicotiana, scabiosa, Kochia and salpiglossis. He knew them all and loved every Latin syllable.

His nostrils dilated with pleasure as he strode, with a loose, almost clanking motion, along the concrete paths. It was a night for romance, for tender, whispered discussions of vitamins and tissue regeneration, of gamma rays and the atom.

Professor Dexter's heart welled with the rich pathos of life. As straight as the curving paths would allow, he headed directly for the neat brick house where dwelt his lady love: Professor Clarissa Wilkins, of the Domestic Science Department.

At the foot of her steps, a shadow loomed out of the dark. It was a very short, barrel-shaped shadow. Prof. Dexter leaned over from his great height, to peer at it.

"Ah--is that you, Donald?" he queried.

"Who were you expecting?" snapped the tubby shadow peevishly. "Hirohito?"

Professor Donald Curtis was in almost every way the opposite of his friend Hiram Dexter. He was five feet two inches in his elevator shoes and his circumference was better than that by two or three inches. He was as quick, and jumpy in his movements as a chipmunk and he seemed to buzz around the taller, slower-moving man like an irritated bumble-bee. Nevertheless they were fast friends, rivals only in their physics research--and for the hand of Professor Clarissa Wilkins.

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