HARVARD EPISODES

BY
CHARLES MACOMB FLANDRAU

BOSTON
COPELAND AND DAY
MDCCCXCVII
First edition (3500 copies) November, 1897
Second edition (5000 copies) December, 1897
COPYRIGHT BY COPELAND AND DAY, 1897
To W. A.
Dear W. A. I have written about a very little corner of a very great place; but one that we knew well, and together.

C. M. F.

CONTENTS

Harvard Episodes

THE CHANCE

TWO men were talking in a room in Claverly Hall. Horace Hewitt, the sophomore who owned the apartment, had passed, during the hour with his visitor, from the state in which conversation is merely a sort of listless chaffing to where it becomes eager, earnest, and perplexing. The other, a carefully dressed, somewhat older young man, across whose impassive, intellectual profile a pair of eyeglasses straddled gingerly, was not, perhaps, monopolising more than his share of the discussion, for Robinson Curtiss was the kind of person to whom a large conversational portion was universally conceded; but he was, without doubt, talking with a continuance and an air of authority that unconsciously had become relentless. Both men were smoking: Hewitt, a sallow meerschaum pipe, with his class in raised letters on the bowl; Curtiss, a cigarette he had taken from the metal case he still held meditatively in his hand. He smoked exceedingly good cigarettes, and practised the thrifty art of always discovering just one in his case.

“So you think my college life from an undergraduate’s standpoint, and it’s the only standpoint I give that for,”—Hewitt snapped his fingers impatiently,—“will always be as much of a fizzle as it has so far?” He had jumped up from the big chair in which he had all along been sprawling and stood before Robinson in an attitude that was at once incredulous and despairing. The momentary embarrassment that Curtiss felt at this unexpected show of feeling on the part of his young friend, took the form of extreme deliberation in returning his cigarette-case to his pocket, and in repeating the performance of lighting his cigarette that had not gone out.

He had not been a graduate quite three years in all, but that had been ample time—particularly as it had been spent far from Cambridge—for the readjustment of certain views of his,—views in which four eventful years at college had been grotesquely prominent. He found, on returning to the university town, that his absence rendered him frequently indifferent to the genuineness and importance, not merely of the more delicate problems of the undergraduate world,—it was one of these on which he was at the present moment indiscreetly touching,—but even to the obvious and common incidents of the academic experience: to the outcome of examinations, to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. It was not until Hewitt stood troubled and expectant before him that Curtiss appreciated how tactless the disparity in their knowledge of things collegiate had made him appear to his young friend. A sudden reminiscent intuition, that flashed him back to his own sophomore year, caused him to feel that what he was saying to Hewitt was almost brutal; in his capacity of a young graduate he had indulged in a cold-blooded lecture (it could hardly be called a discussion) on questions that very properly were not questions to a fellow in Hewitt’s situation, but warm, operative realities. Hewitt was in many ways such a mature young person, his valuation of other people and their actions had always seemed so temperate, so just, that Curtiss, without knowing it, had simply ignored the fellow’s healthy undergraduate attitude. He had failed to assume how eager the sophomore was to be some active part of the new and fascinating life going on everywhere about him; how completely he was possessed by the indefinable, disquieting, stimulative spirit that so triumphantly inhibits Harvard from becoming a mere place of learning. Curtiss had spent the evening in throwing what he sincerely believed was a searching light on some aspects of Harvard life; he was beginning to wish he had allowed Hewitt to perform the office for himself.

“Be honest with me, Curtiss.” Hewitt spoke in the distinct, simple tones that as a rule accompany words one hesitates to trifle with. “You’ve gone through the whole damn thing yourself, and got more out of it—not more than you deserve, of course, but more than most men get; you knew everybody and belonged to—to—” Hewitt hesitated a moment; any single college institution—social, athletic, or intellectual—did not in itself forcibly appeal to him; there was something petty in particularising. “You belonged to—to everything, when you were in college,” he finally said; “how was it done—how is it done every day? I see it going on around me all the time; but I can’t touch it in any way,—it never comes near enough, if you know what I mean; and what I can’t explain to myself is that I don’t see why it should come any nearer to me,—only, I want it to.” The manner in which Horace blurted out the last few words was an epitome of the situation; their confession of keen longing to know and be known in his class had gathered intensity with the growing suspicion that certain conditions of the place—conditions he felt rather than understood—were every day making the realisation of his desire for activity, acquaintances, friendship, more impossible. His great common sense—in Hewitt the quality amounted to a sort of prosaic talent—would always preclude his degenerating into one of the impotently rebellious; it had kept him free from the slightest tinge of bitterness toward any one, but it had not made his interminable, solitary walks up Brattle Street (there was apparently no other walk to take in Cambridge) less interminable; it had enlivened none of the stolid evenings in his rooms which, with a necessary amount of study, a chapter or two from some book he did not much care about, and a bottle of beer, always came to an end somehow or other in spite of themselves; it had not invested stupid theatres with interest, nor mediocre athletics with excitement. Common sense, the prevailing trait of Hewitt’s character, that induced the middle-aged to consider him “singularly well balanced for a young man,” was quite powerless to dispel the desperate loneliness of his sophomore year. His common sense was a coat of mail that defied sabre thrusts, perhaps, but let in the rain.

“You know everything, Rob,” Hewitt smiled; he had after all no wish to appear emotional. “Is there something the matter with me, or with Harvard, that has kept me what you very well know I am—an isolated nonentity who has rather begun to lose hope? Are there other fellows in college who are gentlemen, and used to all the word implies, but who might be in any one of the fifteen leading universities of Kansas, for all the good they are getting out of this place? If I had only been given a chance—” he broke out with sudden vehemence,—“a good, square chance, the kind a man has a right to expect when he enters college—to meet my equals equally—to make myself felt and liked if I had the power to, why I shouldn’t mind failing, you know, not in the least; a man who isn’t an ass accepts chronic unpopularity as he does chronic red hair, or any other personal calamity.” Hewitt’s own locks had sufficient colour to lend authority to his statement. “It isn’t that—it’s the utter impossibility, as far as I can see, of a boy who came here as I did, getting a fair trial. Every day I am more and more convinced that my prospects for the broad, enlightening sort of existence I expected to find on entering Harvard were about as definite and as brilliant as the prospects of a stillborn child on entering the world. What’s the matter? What’s wrong? Who’s to blame?”

There was an admirable force to Hewitt’s manner when he was thoroughly in earnest that, as a rule, roused even in Curtiss a vague apprehension that sincerity was, somehow, obligatory. It did not restrain him, however, from assuming an expression of mock helplessness and murmuring,—

“It’s so long—so intricate.”

“If people only knew what they were in for before they came,” Hewitt continued.

“Maybe they wouldn’t come,” suggested the other.

“Of course they’d come,—the place is too great,—they couldn’t afford to stay away.” Horace passed over the axioms with the impatience of one who has problems to solve. “Of course they would come,” he repeated; “but they would come with their eyes opened—they would know what not to expect; that’s the important thing.”

“Ah, but who could do it? Who would do it? It would be like assisting a new kitten to see by means of a pin. We must all work out our own salvations,” Curtiss added sententiously.

“That brings it right round to my point again,” exclaimed Hewitt. “Of course every man wants to ‘work out his own salvation,’ as you put it; but at Harvard I don’t think it’s every man who is given the opportunity to. He doesn’t know that before he comes, he doesn’t find it out for some time after he gets here; but it’s true, and it’s precisely what I want you to tell me about—to explain.” There was but a faint note of triumph in Hewitt’s voice; he realised that he had Curtiss in a corner, but he had not been conscious of manœuvring to get him there. “Tell me this: Do you think that Harvard—and by that I don’t mean the Officers of Instruction and Government, they’re the least of it—do you think that Harvard is fair, and do you think that it is American?”

There was something so general, so meaningless, so senatorial in the application of Hewitt’s final word that Curtiss was surprised into a shout of laughter.

“Whether it’s fair or not, depends on who’s telling you about it,” he said gravely enough; “but there’s no question as to its nationality,” he laughed again; “of course it’s American, horribly American, deliciously American!”

Hewitt puckered his forehead and waited for more; he did not in the least understand.

“When I say American, I don’t mean what you mean; because—pardon me for saying it—you don’t mean anything.” Curtiss found it suddenly easy to rattle on as he had been doing earlier in the evening; his laugh had cleared the atmosphere. “My dear fellow,” he said, “Harvard University possesses its labouring class, its middle class, and its aristocracy, as sharply, as inevitably, as—as—” he was about to draw a rather over-emphatic comparison between Harvard and the social orders of Sparta in the days of Lycurgus, when Hewitt, still puzzled, broke in with,—

“But if that’s the case, it isn’t American at all—you contradict yourself in the same breath.”

“I assumed that you knew more about your own country,” Curtiss remarked with dry superiority; “I sha’n’t undertake to discuss the social system of the United States; it would simply necessitate my going over a lot of platitudes that would bore us both. It’s only when we apply to our college, what we all know to be so undeniable of the country at large, that the situation at once becomes novel and preposterous to so many people. The conventional idea of an American college—you know this because the idea was yours before you came here—is that it consists of a multitude of lusty young men linked together by the indissoluble bonds of class and college, all striving, shoulder to shoulder, for the same ends, in a general way,—just what the ends are I don’t think the public cares very much, but they’re presumably charmingly unpractical and fine,—and living in an intoxicating atmosphere of intimacy, a robust sense of loyalty that is supposed to pervade the academic groves and render them the temporary home of a great, light-hearted, impulsive, congenial brotherhood. Well, I don’t know whether other American institutions of learning answer the description, because I’ve never been to them; but Harvard doesn’t, not in the slightest particular.”

“Then I wish it wouldn’t attempt to,” murmured Hewitt.

“There is no attempt,” answered Curtiss; “there is merely a pretence,—a pretence that, strangely enough, isn’t meant to deceive any one. We find it in the naïve untruthfulness of the college papers, in the eloquent conventionality of the Class Day Orators; the college press prattles about ‘class feeling’ and all the other feelings that none of us, since the place has grown so large, has ever felt; the orator’s sentiments bear about the same relation to real life that his gestures do: he has a lot to say about everybody’s sitting together at the feet of the Alma Mater; but he doesn’t dwell at all on those of us who have been cuddled in her lap. That’s what I mean when I say the place is consistently ‘American.’” Curtiss got up and took a meditative turn about the room. “The undergraduate body faithfully reproduces, in little, the social orders of the whole country, and not only never formally recognises their existence, but takes occasion, every now and then, somewhat elaborately, to deny it,—a proceeding that of course doesn’t change any one’s position or make any one happier. ‘Fine words,’ indeed, never ‘buttered the parsnips’ of so sophisticated a crowd as you discover at Harvard; but if an American community finds it impossible, by reason of all the thousand and one artificial conditions that make such things impossible, to be ‘free and equal,’ what is left for the distracted concern to do, but flaunt its freedom and its equality, from time to time, in theory?”

“It’s all wrong then—frightfully wrong,” declared Hewitt, with considerable heat. He had been increasingly irritated through the calm progress of Curtiss’s discourse, and now stood with his back to the fire-place, staring fixedly before him,—a spirited figure of protest. “We’re too young at college for that kind of rot,” he went on emphatically; “where, in the name of Heaven, can a fellow expect square treatment, if it isn’t right here among what, just now, you scornfully called ‘a multitude of lusty young men’? They ought to be too young and too lusty and too good fellows to care—even to know about—about—all that.” His words tumbled out noisily, and had the effect of noticeably increasing Robinson’s deliberateness.

“The situation would be in no way remarkable, if it were not for just that fact,—our extreme youth.” Curtiss spoke as if he were still in college. “It’s taken rather for granted that young men, who are delightful in so many ways, are the complete embodiment, when chance herds them together, of the ‘hale-fellow-well-met-God-bless-everybody’ ideal a lot of people seem to have of them. The plain truth of the matter is, that at Harvard, at least, they aren’t at all. Wander a moment from the one royal road we all try to prance along in common here, and you’ll find most of us picking our way in very much the same varied paths we are destined to follow later on. The only wonder is that we should have found them so soon. What makes people’s hair stand on end is that young America should begin to classify himself so instinctively—the crystallisation of the social idea seems, to put it mildly, a trifle premature. But”—Curtiss’s shrug comprehended many things—“what are you going to do about it?”

The question was perfectly general in intention, and might have ended the discussion had not Hewitt regarded it as the natural expression of Curtiss’s interest in his ambitions for a more diverting existence.

“And yet, after all, I am a gentleman as well as they,” he said simply.

There was something exquisitely intelligible to the graduate in the very vagueness of the boy’s pronoun. “They,”—he too, in the early forlornness of his college life, had been eagerly aware of them,—the great creatures, who, for some reason or other (not always a transparent one), seemed to emerge with such enviable distinction from the vast mediocrity of the crowd; “They” who put on astonishing black coats and spent Sunday afternoon in town; “They” who so frequently wore little crimson usher’s badges at the games, and bowed to so many of the attractive people they showed to their seats; “They” who, fine shouldered and brown from rowing on the crews, seemed to endure their education with such splendid listlessness; “They” whom he had so often heard rattling into the suburban stillness of Cambridge just before dawn, from some fine dance in town. How unmistakable they were in the class-room, at a football game, the theatre,—everywhere; how instinctively they seemed to know one another, and how inevitably they came to be felt in every class as something, if not exactly apart, at least aloof. Curtiss stared musingly at the fire a moment, and smiled as he recalled the various trivial circumstances that, in his own case, gradually, and with none of the excitement of a conscious transition, had brought about the substitution of a perfectly natural, matter-of-fact “We,” for the once tacitly understood but exasperating “They.” For a moment he thought of asking Hewitt to explain himself; he had a freakish desire to see the fellow flounder in the effort to be clear, without becoming pitifully transparent; however, he thought better of it, and only answered with some impatience,—

“Of course you’re as much of a gentleman as any one; but that—except very, very superficially—isn’t the question.” Curtiss was beginning to feel like a hoary old oracle. “There’s nothing strange or tragic in your situation; it’s shared by lots of other fellows in college,” he went on; “you slipped into Harvard as soon as your tutor thought you were ready to, and, as you came from a rather obscure place, you slipped in quite alone. A year and a half have dragged themselves through the vagaries of the Cambridge climate; you are still, broadly speaking, quite alone. Yet all this time you have been sensitive—keenly so—to the life that is being lived everywhere around you, and you begin to feel about as essential to the drama as a freshman does when he puts on a somewhat soiled court costume and assists Sir Henry Irving in one of his interesting productions. The trouble with you and every one like you is simply this: you didn’t come to Harvard from a preparatory school with a lot of acquaintances and some friends; you didn’t come from any of the few big towns that annually send a number of fellows who know, or who at least have heard, of one another; you are athletic, perhaps, but scarcely what one would call an athlete—although I confess, that isn’t of much consequence; we don’t, as a rule, reward athletes for being athletes. If they perform well, we applaud them. At Harvard, athletics are occasionally a means to a man’s becoming identified with the sort of people he wishes to be one of; but I have never known them to be an end. Finally, you are not a Bostonian, and when I say ‘a Bostonian,’”—Curtiss removed his glasses and softly polished them with his handkerchief,—“when I say ‘a Bostonian,’” he repeated with the gentlest of satire, “I mean of course a Bostonian that one knows.”

“Now, although you are doubtless a great many interesting and attractive things, you do not happen to be any one of those I have just named; and it is from the men who are, that the crowd destined to be of importance in college—the fellows who are going to lead, who are going to be felt—whatever you choose to call it—will generally originate. Think of your own class for a moment, and, nine times out of ten, the men that you feel would be congenial as well as interesting, if you knew them, are taken from the sort of men I’ve specified.”

“Nine times out of ten!” Hewitt laughed hopelessly, “who the devil is the tenth man?”

“Why, you are, of course,—or you will be,” said Curtiss, gaily. “I was myself, once upon a time. It’s good fun too; my little ‘boom’ was a trifle belated—the tenth man’s usually is; but it only seems to make the more noise for going off all by itself; while it lasts you almost feel as if people were being superlatively nice to you in order to make up for lost time. Nine times out of ten though”—the sweeping phrase was beginning to assume the dignity of a formula—“it’s the other way. The ‘tenth man’ at Harvard would never have escaped from his obscurity and comparative isolation to become the ‘tenth man,’ if it were not for something that seems very much like chance.”

“How is a fellow going to find his chance in a place like this?” Hewitt exclaimed scornfully. “Do you suppose, if I knew where to look for it, that I wouldn’t run out to meet it more than half way?”

“Unfortunately it’s the chances that usually seek the introduction,” answered Robinson, oracularly.

“You mean to say then, in all seriousness, that a man—a gentleman—who comes here as I did, has no reason to expect that, as a matter of course, his friends will be the kind of people he’s been used to at home; that instead of at once finding his own level, he has to sit twirling his thumbs and waiting for the improbable to happen—which it perhaps doesn’t do in the course of four years?” Hewitt was scornful, incredulous, defiant.

“He is at perfect liberty to hope,” said the graduate, quietly; “but I can’t see that he has the slightest reason to expect. As for ‘twirling his thumbs,’ I think he might be better employed if he spent his spare time in going in for foot-ball and glee clubs and the ‘Lampoon’ and the hundred yards’ dash, and all that sort of thing; they bring your name before the college public—make you known and definite, and in that way widen the possibilities.”

“Then I can’t see that college is very different from any place else—from the outside world,” said Hewitt, disappointedly. Curtiss had taken considerable pains to tell him as much some time before; but with Hewitt mere information frequently failed in its mission; he was the sort of person whom to convince, one was first obliged to ensnare into believing that he had arrived at conviction unaided.

“No, it isn’t different; that is to say, Harvard isn’t,” assented Curtiss; “except that it is smaller, younger and possesses its distinctly local atmosphere.”

“Then coming here, under certain circumstances, may be like going to a strange town and living in a hotel.”

“Both ventures have been known to resemble each other.”

“And it’s about as sensible to suppose that your fellow students are going to take any notice of you, as it would be to expect people you had never met to lean out of their front windows and ask you to dinner if you were to stroll down the Avenue some fine evening.” Hewitt’s manner had become grim and facetious.

“You seem to have grasped the elements of the situation,” said Curtiss.

“The system is certainly unique,” mused Hewitt.

“Yes,” answered Robinson, “other colleges have societies; whereas Harvard unquestionably has Society.”

“Do you consider the place snobbish then?” asked Horace.

The graduate thought a moment before answering. “I object to the word,” he said at last; “it’s as easy to say, as vague and denunciatory, as ‘vulgar’ or ‘selfish’ or any of those hardworked terms we apply to other people; you can only say that, making some necessary allowances for a few purely local customs, Harvard society is influenced, or guided, or governed, as you please to express it, by about the same conventions that obtain in other civilised communities. Lots of people who have only a newspaper acquaintance with the place think that wealth is the only requisite here. They have an affection for the phrase ‘a rich man’s college,’—whatever that may mean. But of course all that is absurd to any one who has spent four years in the place, and has known all the fellows with no allowances to speak of who are welcome in pretty much everything; and has seen all the bemillioned nonentities who languish through college in a sort of richly upholstered isolation. ‘Birth’ is certainly not the open sesame; a superficial inquiry into the shop and inn keeping antecedents of some of our most prominent and altogether charming brothers, smashes that little illusion. I’m not a sociologist, and I don’t pretend to know what constitutes society with a big S—to put it vulgarly—here or any place else. But there is such a thing here more than in any other college. An outsider, hearing me talk this way, would say I was making an unnecessarily large mountain out of a very ordinary molehill. But that’s because he wouldn’t understand that Society at Harvard is really the most important issue in undergraduate life. The comparatively few men who compose it, have it in their power to take hold of anything they choose to be interested in, and run it according to their own ideas—which shows the value of even a rather vague form of organisation. Fortunately, their ideas are good ones,—clean and manly. You all find out the truth of this, sooner or later. Then if you haven’t a good time, I suppose you can go away and call the place snobbish—lots of people do.”

“I don’t think that’s my style exactly, and I wish you wouldn’t take that tone about it. I want to know fellows, of course: fellows like Philip Haydock and Endicott Davis and Philip Irving and ‘Peter’ Bradley and Sherman and Prescott,” said Hewitt, frankly, naming six of the most prominent men in his class; “but I can’t imagine myself thinking worse of any of them if—if—”

“If you never do get to know them,” Curtiss broke in; “if your chance fails to materialise—if, after all, you are not the ‘tenth man.’” He got up as if to leave.

“I wish you wouldn’t go,” said the other, earnestly; “there ’re lots of things I want to ask you about. What have men like Bradley and Davis ever done here to be what they are?” he went on hurriedly.

“Ask me something hard,” laughed Curtiss, giving Hewitt his overcoat to hold for him. “They haven’t ‘done’ anything,” he continued, struggling into his sleeves; “I don’t suppose they would know how to. Fellows like Bradley and Davis simply arrive at Harvard when they are due, to fill, in their characteristic way, the various pleasant places that have been waiting the last two hundred and fifty years for them. From the little I’ve seen of them, I should say that these particular two happen to be the kind it would be a pleasure to know anywhere, which isn’t always the case with the ‘Bradleys’ and the ‘Davises’ of college. So, of course, you want to know them,” he ended, emphatically. “What we’ve been calling your ‘chance’ literally consists in fellows like these holding out their hands and saying simply, ‘Come and see me.’” As Curtiss said this, he impressively extended his own hand; Hewitt shook it, absently, and began with some abruptness to talk of other things.

He was, all at once, exceedingly glad that his guest was saying good-night. It was a positive relief to hear his footsteps resounding in the long corridor outside, and to feel the slight tremor of the building as the massive front door closed with a thump; for Curtiss had become, although perhaps unwillingly, that most objectionable person, the recipient of one’s impulsive confidence.

After he had gone, Hewitt stood a moment, looking undecidedly at the glass clock on his mantelpiece. It was long after midnight, and he was in the state of mind when even the oblivion of bed is numbered among sweet but unattainable ambitions. He was tired of his own room; the good taste that had been expended on it had, of late, begun to strike him as inexpressibly futile. Yet there was scarcely any one on whom he could drop in, even at a reasonable time of night, with the objectless familiarity of college intercourse, to say nothing of calling out under a lighted window in the small hours of the morning. He, of course, belonged to no college club, so his evening expeditions were of necessity limited by the theatres in town, or the listless thoroughfares of Cambridge. He often took long, aimless strolls through streets he barely looked at, and whose names he didn’t know. It was with the intention of walking now, that he put on a cap, turned out the lights, and left his room.

The season was that which precedes the first atmospheric intimations of spring. The snow had gone, and the ground was dry, and everything that was shabby and stark and colourless in Cambridge was admitting its inestimable obligation in the past to the loveliness of foliage. There was little of the sympathetic mystery of night in the long street in which Hewitt found himself on leaving his building; its lines of irregular wooden houses, aggressive with painty reflections of the dazzling arc-lights swung at intervals overhead, stretched away in distinct and uninviting perspective. Except where the gaslit sidestreets yawned murkily down to the river, Cambridge was hideous in the rectilinear nakedness of March. The university town is, as a rule, so very still after twelve o’clock that its occasional sounds come to have an individuality to one who prowls about, that the sounds of day do not possess. Intent as he was in pondering over the disheartening things Curtiss had been saying to him, Hewitt’s ears were keen, as he sauntered up the street with his hands in his pockets, to all the night noises he had learned to know so well. A student in a ground-floor room ablaze with light was reading aloud. Horace stopped a moment, and laughed at the sleepy voice droning wearily through the open window,—some one was taking his education hard. A policeman, half a block ahead of him, was advancing slowly down the street by a series of stealthy disappearances into shadowed doorways; Hewitt could hear him rattle the doorknobs before he emerged again to glitter a moment under the electric light; a car that had left town at half-past twelve was thumping faintly along somewhere between Boston and the Square—it might have been a great distance away, so intensely still was the intervening suburb; and through all the flat, silent streets the night air, cool and pungent with the damp of salt marshes, blew gently up from the Charles and intensified the atmosphere of emptiness.

Naturally enough, Hewitt’s sense of isolation was far less on these solitary rambles of his, than when he jostled elbows in crowded class-rooms with fellows who, he felt, were potentially his friends, at the same time that he was realising how utterly excluded he was from their schemes of life. Morbidness was foreign to a nature like his; and yet, as time went on, he had been forced to regard Cambridge as most satisfactory when deserted and asleep. It was only then that the forlorn feeling of being no essential part of his surroundings often left him; and although he recognised the weakness of strolling away from unpleasant truths, the altogether unlooked-for state of affairs at college had cowed him into temporary helplessness. That this furtive condition was temporary, even he himself was in a measure aware; one cannot but feel at college that after a certain time has passed, one’s fellows, in spite of the plasticity of youth, become, if not solid, at least viscous, in the moulds that have received them. There is an uneasy period of ebullition in which boys try very hard to enjoy the things that they do, in the absence of the self-poise that enables them to do what they eventually find they enjoy. Intimacies are formed and broken; habits are acquired and not broken; there is a weighing and a levelling, and at last, toward the end of one’s sophomore year, almost everybody has been made or marred or overlooked.

It was an intuition of something of this kind that led Hewitt, in his more thoughtful moods, to realise that he was having his worst time now. The great, ill-assorted crowd that technically composed his “class” would shift and change and finally become, not satisfied, perhaps, with the various combinations it had evolved, but certainly used to them. After that, life at Harvard, Hewitt told himself, would be simplified for him; the time for identifying one’s self with the companions of one’s choice would have come and gone; he would find himself standing alone. His future development would not be just what he had expected; but there was peace in the thought that his position would be definite, unalterable, and then, after all, he would be standing, and not running away, as in the past year he had been so often tempted to do. Although anything but a student, he could even fancy himself ploughing doggedly in self-defence through an incredible number of courses in history, or some such subject, and at the end pleasing his family with two or three Latin words of a laudatory nature on his degree. Hewitt was too thinking and too just a person not to have frequently contrasted his own condition with that of fellows one occasionally heard about, who starved their way through college on sums that would have made scarcely an impression on his room-rent; their persistent “sandiness” compelled his admiration; more than once he had given substantial expression to it. But it was at best a very theoretical sort of consolation that came from a knowledge of the depressing fact that many of his most deserving classmates neither ate nor bathed. His unhappiness differed in kind, but not in reality.

Although he appreciated how easy and foolish it was to assume the “chance” the graduate had dwelt on with such apparent authority, and then let loose an imagination that had been nourished for so long on nothing more satisfying than itself, he, nevertheless, could not help projecting himself into some of the delightful possibilities of that chance. As he loafed through sleeping Cambridge, he pictured himself under a variety of circumstances playing parts neither fanciful nor egoistic, but strikingly unlike the one he had been cast for. The common-place incident of being joined in the College Yard by two or three friends on their way to the same lecture, made his heart beat faster to think of; the thought of starting off for an evening in town with a crowd of fellows—like those talkative groups he so often saw after dinner, waiting impatiently on the corner for a bridge car—stirred him to a mild, pleasant sort of excitement. He even held imaginary conversations with Haydock and Davis and Bradley and the rest of them, in which he modestly refrained from saying all the good things,—conversations in which these classmates of his emerged, became individuals, and for an hour seemed glad to be numbered among Hewitt’s acquaintance. With his exhaustive knowledge of what might happen to a boy at college, he liked to imagine himself in the position where friends and influence are synonymous, constantly keeping fresh the memory of his own dreary experience, and taking infinite joy in quietly extricating others from a similar one.

When Hewitt returned to Claverly by a circuitous way through the College Yard, and out again into the empty triangular Square, he found a dumpy, patient-looking herdic cab drawn up to the curbstone. The driver had tucked away his money somewhere in the region of his portly waist, and was pulling his coat over the spot, preparatory to mounting the box. But the tall young man in evening dress, who apparently had just paid him, had not yet turned to pass through the brightly lighted doorway. Hewitt, noting the overcoat that lay limp and unheeded on the sidewalk, and the almost imperceptible uncertainty of the young fellow’s neat, boyish back in its conscious equilibrium, stopped to give that second and more searching look one always gives a drunken man, however usual the spectacle of drunkenness. They both stood there a moment: Hewitt half way up the stone steps of the building, the other with his back turned, swaying gently on the walk below, as if listening to the diminishing clatter of the shabby little cab. Horace scarcely knew why he himself lingered over an affair so personal and so manifestly not his own. He found justification for his curiosity, however,—although it was characteristic neither of his college nor himself,—when the object of it started slowly and aimlessly down the street, leaving his overcoat on the bricks, where it had dropped.

The garment was a light, slender thing, and as Horace hung it over his arm and smoothed its soft lining with his fingers, he wondered more what its wearer was like, than what he should do with it. It was easy enough to keep the coat in his room until—as was sure to happen—an advertisement, somewhat vague as to where the article had been lost, appeared in the “Harvard Crimson,” or he might restore it at once to its owner, who by this time had stopped undecidedly in the black shadow on the nearest street-corner. There was something companionable in the way the coat clung to his arm, that made him wish to keep it a little longer; but he ended by doing the simpler thing.

“Isn’t this your overcoat?” he said, walking up to the sharp line of shadow on the other side of which the shirt bosom and face of the drunken student showed faintly. Hewitt broke the pause that followed by repeating his question.

“Oh, how good of you! I had half decided to go after it,” came from the darkness in an astonishingly clear, fresh voice, whose convincing mastery of the first letter of the alphabet left little doubt as to its possessor’s birthplace. Had not the words been said with a formality that, under the circumstances, was absurd, Hewitt would have felt that he misjudged the man’s condition.

“Don’t mind me, really, I’m very, very tight.” It was impossible to misconstrue this statement, or the wild, exultant over-emphasis with which the final word was declaimed. Hewitt laughed.

“Oh, are you?” he answered, adding, “well, here’s your overcoat,” as if these two facts existed only in conjunction.

The man in the shadow veered suddenly from the wall he had been leaning against into the light; and Horace—seeing him distinctly for the first time—realised that it was his classmate, Bradley. Coming immediately after the talk with Curtiss, this meeting was startling to Horace. It seemed almost prearranged. He gently forced Bradley to take the overcoat, said good-night, and turned to walk away.

“Don’t go to bed! Oh, don’t go to bed!” pleaded Bradley, in a sort of engaging whimper. His clutch at Hewitt’s shoulder might have been either a gesture of entreaty or a measure of safety. “It’s early—awf’ly early. The longer you stay up in Cambridge the earlier it gets; and the sparrows walk all over Mount Auburn Street in the morning and sing,—corking big ones, like ostriches,—seen them lots of times. Don’t go to bed!”

“I’m afraid I must,” said Horace, looking gravely into his classmate’s large, kindly eyes, that swam helplessly, and focussed nothing. Bradley took possession of Hewitt’s other shoulder; then, in the intimate confidential tone that for so long had ceased to exist for Horace, he said, “I don’t want to go to bed—come on!”

The invitation, though as to form rather indefinite, was most sincere. There was distinctly some sort of an intention in Bradley’s wish to have the other man “Come on;” he spoke as if he already had expressed it. Hewitt, scanning his drawn face, and then lowering his glance to the snowy shirt-bosom, tried hard to find out, without asking, exactly where “on” was. Of course, any proposition from the fellow just then might be, in a general way, safely interpreted, “More drinks;” instinct told Horace that. But beyond this broad point of departure, along what lines did the amiable tipsy young person intend to proceed? He was becoming every moment more demonstrative, more insistent, and by reason of his condition, rather than in spite of it, more irresistible. Was he going back to town? Did he have some stuff in his own room? Or had he, perhaps, reached the stage that plans nothing more elaborate than the primitive, genial pastime of lurching, arm in arm, along the streets and making a noise? Bradley suddenly answered the unput questions by suggesting ways and means.

“We can wait until somebody comes out in a cab, and go back in it; done it lots of times.” He gave Hewitt a little urging shake.

“Why, you’ve just come from town about a minute ago!” Horace’s attempt to back gently from under his friend’s nervous hands was a failure. Bradley gave him the long, wise look of one whose mind is blank, until a slow sort of inspiration enabled him to exclaim,—

“Well, you can’t stay in there all alone, can you? “—a very telling bit of argument. “I came out here to get you; that’s why I came out.”

Hewitt burst into honest laughter. This tall child struck him as indescribably funny and young and drunk. Then, with a quick downward wriggle, he broke away, still laughing, and made a dash for the steps. Hatless, wild-eyed Bradley, screaming curses into the night, had him round the knees, as he stumbled across the top step to the door. Together they rolled and slid, scuffling, gasping, to the brick sidewalk.

“You would try to get away from me, would you? What a hell of a dirty trick to play a man! You would, would you?”

“Get off my stomach, Bradley, you hurt me.”

“You would break away, would you?” The robust emphasis of the remark pounded a painful staccato grunt out of Hewitt’s vitals.

“Please let me up!” It took a good deal of self-control to put it just that way; Hewitt had bumped his head, and was beginning to feel the cool bricks against his back.

“Oh, I don’t know,” mused Bradley, airily; “‘you’re not the only pebble on the beach.’” Then, after a silence, in which the man under him tried to rest his head more comfortably, “Will you be good? Do you know—I don’t think I can trust you! If I let you up, will you do what I want you to?”

“We’ll talk it over,” the other conceded.

They scrambled to their feet; Hewitt brushed himself off with his cap. Had both men been sober, they would have looked at each other a moment, and laughed. Under the circumstances, the situation was grotesque enough to seem quite natural to Bradley.

“Come on,” he said; “now we’ll go to town. Oh, my hat! where’s my hat—and my coat!” He cursed, as he looked about him,—an amiable, ingenuous ripple of blasphemy, as harmless in intention and as cheerfully spoken as a bit of verse.

A returning cab swung round the corner. Bradley sauntered into the middle of the street to stop it. The manner in which all idea of hat and coat passed from his mind made Hewitt think of a round-eyed baby absently letting drop the toy that has been thrust into its convulsive little fist. To Horace the cab was an unwelcome intrusion. He thought it foretold complications, and perhaps a scene. For he had decided, beyond the probability of changing his mind, that he would not spend the rest of the night in Boston with his exhilarated classmate. A nicer reticence than the simple one of moral scruples kept him from carousing with his new acquaintance. He shrank from taking advantage of this chance—so accidental, so far-fetched—of impressing himself on the one fellow in his class whose friendship, more than any other, he coveted. The proceeding, he felt, would be a somewhat thick-skinned one. There was something in the idea, not quite like winning a drunken man’s money at cards, but suggestive of it. “Peter” Bradley symbolised to Hewitt an entire chapter of Harvard life. To-night, Horace felt, in coming so unexpectedly on one with whom he existed in all the intimacy of the imagination, as if he had been caught surreptitiously reading the chapter in manuscript.

He went out where Bradley was talking earnestly to the cab-driver.

“Let’s not go to town, Bradley,” he said, yawning. “It’s so far and chilly and everything.” Quickly, as if inspired by a new and daring thought, he grasped the boy by the wrist, and exclaimed enthusiastically, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do—we’ll stay in Cambridge!”

“By Heaven, I’ll go you! Eh-h-h-h-h-h—we’ll stay in Cambridge! we’ll stay in Cambridge!” He danced all over the street in a frenzy of mirth and movement, singing again and again, “We’ll stay in Cambridge! we’ll stay in Cambridge! we’ll stay in Cambridge!” while Hewitt said, “Good-night—sorry he troubled you,” to the cabman. A voice from one of the small wooden houses that basks in the shadow of Claverly, yelled, “Oh, shut tup!” very peevishly, just as Bradley threw himself at Horace with a prolonged meaningless scream.

“What do you think you’d like to do now?” asked Hewitt, after a moment, bracing himself to support his burden.

“Wait till I get my breath, and we’ll do—everything,” panted the burden. It laughed hysterical, extremely silly little laughs. Then solemnly, soberly, Bradley led the way to the curbstone. “Come over here—I want to talk to you; sit down,” he said. “Will you wait here and not let a sparrow get by—not a single one—while I dash across and find something to drink?”

“It’s getting cold, Bradley; how long will you be?”

“You won’t know I’ve been gone, I’ll be so quick.” He was off,—half way across the street like a skittish young animal,—then tip-toeing back, stealthy, furtive, mysterious. He crouched by the man on the curbstone, and with his mouth close to Hewitt’s ear whispered earnestly:—

“If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell? It’s a secret, you know.”

“I don’t think you’d better,” gravely.

“I must,—it’s killing me.”

Horace looked to see if the fellow was crying.

“I’ll never repeat it to any one,” he promised.

“It’s awful,—horrible,” moaned Bradley, drawing closer to Hewitt, and putting his arms round him. “It’s this,” he sobbed; “I don’t believe in either Space or Time.” He was gone again, with a backward spring that sent the other sprawling. Horace sat up and watched the boy dart across to an opposite house, fumble a moment at the door, and disappear with a slam. Instantly every window upstairs and down glowed yellow. The noise of a piano, slapped pettishly from bass to treble by an open palm, came over to the young man who sat thinking on the curbstone.

What he thought was just about what any other normal person, under the same circumstances, would have thought. He wondered how long it would be before Peter came back; what they would do when he did come back; and where that night was leading. It might take him, Horace, far,—almost anywhere,—away from himself, to a troop of friends, to the club across the street. Or it might leave him at night’s ordinary destination. But whatever the end, the beginning was his opening, his chance. It had pranced at him in the guise of a crazy, faunlike, drunken thing; thanks to Curtiss, he had recognised it.

He tried to picture to himself the inside of the club house, over whose charmed threshold his friend had just plunged. He also marvelled a moment at the vagaries of inebriety; it was curious, for instance, that any one so far gone—so driven by every whimsical, erratic impulse as Bradley—should give heed to the etiquette that did not permit him to take into the club a man who had no club of his own. How artful the youth must have thought himself, when he left Horace behind, ostensibly to detain any large imaginary sparrows that might pass that way. Hewitt had begun to hope that the drink Bradley brought back might be beer, when the windows opposite blackened, the door slammed, and the boy came toward him once more. His expedition had not been in vain; in one hand he carried a pompous looking bottle, in the other some glasses that clinked cheerfully as he walked. From under one of his arms a second bottle aimed at Hewitt like a small piece of artillery.

“Unload me. That one’s burgundy; look out, don’t spill it, I pulled the cork. The other’s fizz. These are glasses. Got a knife?—cut the wires.” Bradley sat down on the curbstone.

“This looks as if we were going to see the sunrise,” said Hewitt, opening his penknife.

“I’d rather wait till hell freezes over; seen the other thing lots of times.” He filled a long glass more than half full of burgundy, and guzzled it. “Ugh—what belly wash—hot as tea.”

“That’s what you get for looking on the wine when it’s red. Here—try this.” Hewitt handed the other glass. It foamed at the edges.

“I could die drinking this stuff,” said Bradley, fervently.

“You probably will—here, give me some.” Horace with difficulty got possession of the glass, and held it to his lips. Bradley amused himself by wiping his wet hands in his friend’s hair.

They sat there until Peter had managed to drink and spill the contents of both bottles. He refused to tell where his room was, so Hewitt attempted to take him to Claverly. The task called for an infinite amount of patience and tact as well as time. For Peter’s manner, though all at once excessively polite, was firm.

“It’s ever so good of you to take all this trouble for me,” he asserted, in worried tones. Then he would lie down in the street, saying he was a dead horse, and refuse to get up. The affair became almost annoying when, on reaching the inside of Claverly by a great number of almost imperceptible advances, Bradley tore the fire apparatus from its red cage on the wall in one of the long corridors, and screamed “Fire!” like a maniac. If anything in the situation admitted of being called fortunate, it was the proximity of Horace’s room at that particular moment.

The proctors in Claverly are supposed to sleep in the attitude of one whose ears are tense with listening. And it has been said that during the hours in which convention prescribes pyjamas, their costume is of blanket wrappers and felt slippers. Their appearance upon a “scene of disturbance” has been estimated, variously, as simultaneous with the disturbance, or anywhere from one to ten seconds after it. Horace had just time enough to thrust Peter into his room, lock the door, and begin to gather up the hose, when Mr. Tush—arriving silently from nowhere—was there. The dishevelled Mr. Tush was absurd or sublime, according to the mood of the one who apperceived him. To the dispassionate onlooker, he merely gave an impression of hair and responsibility.

“The janitor will arrange the fire apparatus, Mr. Hewitt,” he said, drily. “By the way, would you mind explaining why it happens to be on the floor?”

Hewitt did explain. He was very sorry; a friend of his had come out from town; the friend was not quite himself; he was noisy and unmanageable; it would not happen again.

“There has been a great deal of disturbance in the building recently, Mr. Hewitt.”

Horace could think of no answer in which impertinence did not lurk.

“Where is your friend?”

“In my room.”

“Is he a student in Harvard University?”

“No.”

“Good-night, Mr. Hewitt.”

“Good-night, Mr. Tush.”

Afterward, whenever Hewitt thought over his meeting with Peter Bradley, the monosyllable loomed up big and disconcerting. What preceded and followed it were nothing. He had not minded Bradley’s drunken tyranny; the experience was novel. He had not objected to undressing the boy and putting him to bed; it was inevitable. But the lie meant something, and the memory of it hurt; although he believed it to be the simplest, most effective way of disposing of Tush.

Hewitt spent what was left of the night on his divan, and got up in time for a nine o’clock. He would have much rather slept until noon; but he did not want to be in his room when Bradley woke; he felt it might be rather trying for Bradley. So he hung clean towels over the edge of the bathtub, and pinned a note to the back of the chair on which he had laid his guest’s clothes, saying: “Sorry I have to run away. Hope you’ll find everything you want.” It was after eleven o’clock when he came back; but the fellow was still sleeping. Horace stood in the doorway a moment and watched the flushed, childish face on the pillow; it seemed incredible that Peter should be curled up there in bed. Then he tiptoed away and had luncheon at a hotel in town, and spent the afternoon looking at shop-windows.

Three days afterwards, while Hewitt was waiting in his room for Curtiss, who was coming round for a walk, Bradley came to see him. It was probably not a very easy thing to do; but Bradley did it adequately. His manner—sober—was the kind that a stranger attributes to shyness, an intimate friend to simplicity.

“I wasn’t nice at all the other night, was I?” he said, after a moment of awkwardness, during which they both laughed. “I’m awfully sorry about it really; it must have bored you like anything.”

“It didn’t at all,” declared Horace. He held out a package of cigarettes.

“Well, tell me what happened; I think I must have been a great deal tighter than you thought I was.”

“No, I don’t think that—” began Hewitt, at which they laughed some more. “Why, nothing very much happened; you merely—do you remember getting the champagne and burgundy?”

“Oh, perfectly.”

“Well, do you remember lying down in the street and refusing to get up?”

“No-o-o—” very doubtfully. (After all, I suppose one doesn’t remember such things.)

“Well, you did, and I had a time getting you here; and don’t you remember anything at all about the hose and the proctor and—”

So it was lived over again from beginning to end, with a great deal of detail and laughing and remorse of a cheerful and unconvincing kind. Bradley looked serious when he heard the part about the proctor; but on learning that Mr. Tush had not seen him, and that Hewitt’s lie had made the chance of a more careful inquiry quite improbable, he found the whole thing immensely amusing.

“I have a lot to thank you for,” he said, staring about the room. Hewitt made the inevitable protest, and then there was a pause. These two persons, who were Harvard men, classmates, and about the same age, suddenly had nothing to talk about. The single point at which their lives touched was the tiniest dot on the page of their experience,—the sort of dot, too, that both were willing to ignore as quickly as possible. They no doubt listened to the same lectures from time to time. But one does not, apropos of nothing at all, discuss the Malthusian Doctrine or the importance of the semicolon in literature.

You can’t talk to a college man about himself, when his career is a pleasanter one than your own, because—well, because you mustn’t. And you can’t talk to a man who is to you an unknown quantity,—a nonentity, a cipher,—simply because you can’t. It’s all very distressing, and you talk about athletics. But in the month of March the effort is transparent and a bore. Neither football nor base-ball is contemporaneous; the crew is still rather vague; and when you plunge recklessly into track athletics, it occurs to you, all at once, that you haven’t taken the trouble to go near any since your freshman year. It’s impossible, therefore, to recall whether Spavins is the person who ran the hurdles in sixteen, or reached incredible heights in the pole vault; it is even likely that Spavins did neither, and was all the time behind the bleachers absorbed in putting the shot. To tell the truth, you don’t know Spavins; you have never met him; you never will, and you always skip the column in the “Crimson” that records his exploits.

This was the basis on which Hewitt and Bradley finished their talk. The peculiar occasion of their being in the same room together was at an end. Bradley lingered merely because an innate sense of proportion kept him there; to leave the minute you say the only thing you came to say, is like running out of church before the people all round you are done confiding things to the backs of the pews in front of them. Your devotions only properly cease when the subdued spontaneous exertion of stout women regaining the perpendicular gives you the signal. Bradley was waiting for the signal. The bell on Harvard Hall, calling students to the last lecture of the day, sounded it.

“There goes the bell; I must hurry along,” he said, fingering the note-book he had brought with him.

“Oh, cut your lecture!” came from Horace rather eagerly. Bradley looked up in surprise. His face was not well fashioned for concealing what went on in his head. Just now it distinctly said, “How extraordinary! Why should I cut my lecture?” His words, however, were, “Oh, no, thank you; I must run along!” He took another cigarette to smoke on the way over to the Yard, and sauntered round the room, although he mentioned more than once his fear of being late. At the door, he turned to say, “Well, good-bye; I hope you know how much obliged I am to you for all that.”

“There isn’t anything really. Good-bye.” Horace assisted at the opening and shutting of the door, in the unnecessary way one does with strangers. Then he walked slowly up and down his study, with his hands in his pockets, whistling energetically under his breath, and stopping every now and then to stare out of the window. Curtiss came in almost immediately.

“I met that good-looking classmate of yours, Bradley, at the door,” he said. Curtiss walked straight up to Hewitt,—he had a dramatic way of doing almost everything,—and grasped his friend’s hand. “Has he been here?” he asked, smiling a pleased smile.

“Yes; he’s just left.”

A pause.

“Did he ask you to go see him?”

“No,” very simply.

“Will he come back?”

“No.”

“The pig!”

“I beg your pardon, he’s nothing of the kind.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, then.”

“Oh, yes, you do, better than anybody, except possibly myself.”

Another silence.

“Well, go on; I’m waiting.”

“Why should the man ask me to go see him?” asked Hewitt, passionately. “He—”

“But, my dear boy!” protested Curtiss.

“Don’t! don’t!” Horace drew away pettishly. “When you bluff like that, you make me sick. Bradley has done everything he ought to have done, and more too,” he went on quietly. “If I expect more, I’m a fool; if you do, you’re a hypocrite! Bradley might have written me a polite note, and considered the thing square. Instead of that he took the trouble to climb up here to apologise and thank me. He was well-bred and polite and unget-at-able,—the way gentlemen ought to be. And that’s all; that’s the end of it. We’ll never see each other again; why should we? I suppose if I’d gone to any other college in the country, and this had happened, Bradley would have put his paws on my shoulders and lapped my face; and we’d have roomed together next year, and proposed to each other’s sisters on Class Day. But I didn’t go to any other college; I’m damned glad I didn’t,—everybody always is. I don’t know why, but I am. Between you and Bradley, I’ve learned more about this place than I ever knew there was to know. If I could write, I’d knock the spots out of any magazine article on Harvard that’s ever been printed.” Horace stopped and looked out of the window. What he had been saying was a curious mixture of bitterness and indifference.

“Come, let’s take a walk,” he exclaimed briskly, in another tone.

“Yes, let’s,” answered Curtiss; “that’s what I came for,” and he began to hum, while Horace was looking for a hat,—

“Oh, Harvard was old Harvard
When—”

THE SERPENT’S TOOTH

“COLLEGE LIFE,” murmur old men, as they pause a moment, before getting into bed, and listen to the singing of some drunken cabmen in the street below.

“College life,” whisper the Cambridge unsought, as they cut out preposterous baby clothes at the Social Union and discuss somebody or other’s ungraceful departure from the University.

“College life,” shudder apprehensive mothers, diagnosing the athletic column for dislocations.

“College life,” mutters the father of the man who got sixteen A’s and brain fever.

“College life”—but Dickey Dawson and the three fellows who had stopped in to see him that afternoon, rather prided themselves on not being typical of any recognised phase of that comprehensive platitude. They had all, thus far, in their college life, ingeniously escaped going in for anything in particular and were in the habit of regarding themselves as a nucleus for a future society, to be composed of unrepresentative Harvard men. Little Dickey Dawson even went so far as to be almost ashamed of his own undeniable popularity; but, as he remarked apologetically, “It is not always possible to avert success.”

He was not well that afternoon. The college physician had come, caused Dickey to throw back his head, open wide his mouth and say “ah-h-h, ah-h-h,” while he peered in with a sort of deprecatory craftiness and found, “no white spots, but a state of congestion.”

Generally speaking, your acquaintances at college do not realise that you have been sick until they meet you in the Yard and are given an opportunity to express their belated sympathy. The men, however, who were gossiping in Dickey Dawson’s room that day, were the men who had missed him at breakfast and luncheon and had come to hunt him up—the men, in short, whom he knew best and enjoyed most.

There was Tommy, with the profile and the glasses. He was the sort of person who occasionally writes wordy little book reviews for an obscure literary magazine, and refers to himself, now and then, as “a driven penny-a-liner.” Then there was Charlie Bolo who was not popularly credited with much sense beyond his exceedingly deformed sense of humour. There was also Bigelow—a bore with an accomplishment. All three of them had a kind of verbal agility that passed, among themselves, for cleverness.

“What means this ghastly pomp and circumstance?” asked Dickey Dawson from the sofa, as he reached out and clutched at the voluminous tails of Tommy’s frock coat.

“It means, my dear, that I have been to see two women whom I never met before,” answered Tommy, daintily gathering his skirts about him and sitting down. “One of them lived in a suburb and was perfectly horrible.”

“The other,” put in Charlie Bolo, who possessed the disagreeable gift of conversational prophecy, “lived in a dungeon on a proper street, and was merely horribly perfect.”

“Yes, you are right,” assented Tommy, complacently. “She was a Bodkin, and—well—you know—Bodkins are Bodkins.” He submitted to the sui generical fashion in which one is obliged to refer to certain Boston families.

“Ah, you know a Bodkin, you know the kind of woman I mean,” he went on dramatically. “She’s the woman who lies awake at night—dreading your arrival, for her only clew to your identity is a perfunctory letter of introduction informing her that you are from a place of which she never heard. She is the woman who, when you call, roosts discreetly at the extreme end of a long sofa and extends a series of well-worn social ‘feelers,’ while her daughter makes tea in a masterly, unemotional way, and supposes, from time to time, ‘that you graduate this year,’ or ‘that you must find Cambridge dull after—after—’”

“Those are some of the local formulae for tact,” broke in Charlie Bolo.

“The other one—the suburban—was truly a most loathely creature,” continued Tommy in the harsh incisive voice that made what he said so difficult to forget. “She didn’t even give me tea; and you know how many clever things I can say about tea.” His smile was an impertinent challenge. “My Aunt got me into it,” he half yawned; “there was, I believe, some reason why I ought to go, and as it wasn’t a very urgent one—I went. The thing actually seemed glad to see me.”

“Imagine,” laughed Dickey Dawson cautiously, for he was learning how to regulate his spontaneity when talking to fellows like Tommy and Charlie Bolo and Bigelow, and had come to believe that he laughs best who laughs least.

“Yes, and she’d been abroad and seen the Passion Play, or the Lakes of Killarney, or some such thing, and was altogether a most impossible sort of a person. I fancy she is what they call ‘a superior woman’ in this country—they don’t exist anywhere else, I believe.”

Dickey Dawson’s throat was too sore to admit of his talking much himself, and as Tommy was there to entertain him he said:

“Curse her more specifically.”

“Oh, what is the use?” Tommy shrugged his shoulders. “Besides, I couldn’t very well, as the superior woman is not a human being, but a type. You’ve certainly seen lots of her—there is no man fortunate enough not to have. They appeal to the imagination of—”

“Of the unimaginative, who always marry them,” interrupted Charlie Bolo.

“Yes, and aren’t they usually stout, or inclined to be?” asked Bigelow, abstractedly. He was looking through some music books at the piano.

“Oh dear yes; no thin woman need aspire to superiority, nor no unmarried one either. They are essentially wives and mothers, but not vulgarly so necessarily.” It was what he considered accuracy rather than any latent charity that had induced Tommy to add this detail.

“A woman whose efficiency transcends every emergency, known or unknown, is in a fair way toward becoming superior,” he continued. “She’s the abnormally normal—the hope of the race—the oatmeal of humanity—Philistia felix—wow!”

Charlie Bolo had a habit, not uncommon among college men in college rooms, of carrying on most of his conversation with his back turned, and at the same time examining minutely every picture in the apartment, vaguely opening most of the books and putting them down again, critically peering at a “shingle” here, and striking a meaningless chord or two on the piano there, and from time to time asking questions about one’s various belongings, answers to which—if ever rashly undertaken—involved the short but intricate history of one’s life. Charlie Bolo, who from an extended practice in doing all these depressing things had reduced his method of inspecting a room to a sort of erratic system, was just finishing the third wall and passing on to the mantelpiece of Dickey Dawson’s study. Here he stopped to admire, for the hundredth time or more, a picture of Dawson’s mother. Simultaneously Tommy came to the end of his wordy little diatribe, and glanced up with what was known to the others as his most “receptive smile.” He, too, seemed to suspend animation before Mrs. Dawson’s likeness, and during the second or two of silence that followed, both Bigelow and Dickey found their attentions fixed on the picture that Charlie Bolo had taken in his hand.

Mrs. Dawson, a remarkably young-looking woman in evening dress, was leaning slightly back in one of the massive, richly carved chairs peculiar to ancient Italy and modern photography.

From the point of view of mere line Mrs. Dawson seemed to be a handsome woman. However, it was not the manner in which her somewhat haughty head stood out from the soft, dull grey of its tapestry background, nor yet the white slope of her shoulders against the dark wood, that most impressed one. The charm of the picture—for it unquestionably had great charm—came rather from the perfection of the lady’s equipment, and the regal ease with which she seemed to ignore it. Charlie Bolo, who had the wisdom of a man with sisters, always found the photograph of Mrs. Dawson faultless—from the bit of white ribbon twisted through her hair, and the fan of ostrich plumes, and the long, limp glove lying lightly across her lap, to the non-committal exposure of shoe-tip.

There was the briefest possible pause in the talk; but coming at the exact time it did, it was more than long enough to enlighten every one as to what every one else was thinking. To Dickey Dawson, who seized the opportunity of giving all three men a hasty, apprehensive glance, it was as if some one had in so many words exclaimed, “At least this woman is not superior!” But, of course, no one could have exclaimed such a thing with Tommy sitting there, exerting the tacit admonition of inspired refinement.

This tribute, manifesting itself in spontaneous silence, was fraught with both pleasure and wretchedness for Dickey Dawson: pleasure, that these fellows whom he so admired and looked up to, should unquestioningly accept the splendid picture lady as his mother, together with all that the relationship implied; wretchedness, because he was much too intelligent a young person not to be thoroughly aware that the splendid picture lady was a glorified arrangement of upholstery and apparel, bearing about as much resemblance to his mother as, for purely decorative purposes, he chose to have it bear. He was proud of the portrait, because it was a success of his own conceiving; he loathed it, because it was forever rubbing in the fact that his relations, though doubtless admirable in the exercise of their respective domestic functions, were execrable as a social background. He detested it also, because it kept unpleasantly vivid in his mind the long diplomatic struggle that had preceded its taking.

“Other boys have family pictures in their rooms at college,” he had said to his mother in the vacation that followed his sophomore year; “I want one of you to take back with me.” Whereupon Mrs. Dawson, with considerable pleasure and some reminiscent vanity, had produced several from an album. Dickey had inspected them gravely, from the one in which his mother was picking shamelessly artificial pond-lilies over the side of an unseaworthy skiff, to the jauntily posed “cabinet size.”

“I should like to have one that looked more as you do now,” he had said, affectionately smoothing her hair and wondering if he could manage it.

He had managed it, of course. He was always tactful, and could on occasions be tender and persuasive. These qualities, added to the authority he exerted in his capacity of American child, had in time overcome his mother’s objections to the background, properties, pose, coiffure, and, most difficult of all, the costume he had insisted on—had, in fact, even achieved a sublime finishing touch by having, instead of an ordinary gilt advertisement, the pliable photographer’s name scrawled carelessly in pencil across the margin of his print. Mrs. Dawson had been exceedingly shocked at the result, and had, not unnaturally, failed to recognise herself in the gracious, self-possessed personage who gave one the impression of having sunk into that picturesque seat for a moment, until her carriage should be called. She had speedily regretted, what she from time to time referred to as her “weakness,” and had hastened to exhibit the strength she still retained by breaking the negative with her own hands—not, however, before Dickey had procured some striking proofs of it. The very success of the picture was what made it such a disturbing addition to Dawson’s room. In the appreciation of his friends it had furnished him with precisely the sort of mother to which his eclectic and exotic inclinations seemed to entitle him. He himself, in his more placid moods, derived an indefinable satisfaction from the thing, and was in the habit of sitting before it, musing contentedly on his perfect adaptability to the people and surroundings he had never been used to at home—an adaptability that sometimes caused him to wonder whether he were not, after all, illegitimate or adopted. Ordinarily, however, this fanciful parent of his appeared to him in the light of a cunningly devised, automatic lie that kept on telling itself to make him miserable.

Charlie Bolo carefully returned the photograph to its place. His back had been turned to the room and he was, perhaps, the only one of the four men who did not realise the direction every one’s thoughts had taken.

“I think I shall have to get rid of that libel on my mother,” mused Dawson, brazenly.

“I was so sorry not to find Mrs. Dawson in the afternoon I called,” said Charlie Bolo, passing on to a silver candlestick. “Is she to be long in town?”

“So was I,” murmured Bigelow; “Bolo and I went together.”

“You must give her a tea,” suggested Tommy, getting up. When he had on his frock coat, he sat intermittently.

“I should like to, tremendously,” lied Dawson, with a pleasant smile; “but you see she’s going away to-morrow. She was awfully cut up about missing you fellows—I think she was at a luncheon, or some such thing.” He courageously took the chances of any one’s having seen her naïvely admiring the Washington Elm and the Longfellow House on the afternoon in question. “She’s going to be here such a very short time”—this was a detail, but it seemed just as well to dwell on it—“that you can fancy how I feel about being laid up like this.”

Bigelow said, “rotten,” or some equally piquant idiom of assent, and Charlie Bolo, by commenting technically on a Dutch tile he had come across, was on the point of giving an entirely new turn to the talk, when something happened.

It has often been told how little Dickey Dawson, once upon a time, saved somebody or other’s life by coolly dangling himself to the bridle of a big, runaway horse. The occasion on which he drew red hot poker sketches where a dog had bitten the calf of his leg, has likewise had its historians. But no one has ever described what took place when, in the midst of Charlie Bolo’s exposition of tile painting, Dickey called, “Come in!” to a doubting knock at the door, and Mrs. Dawson advanced two steps into the study and then stopped.

For a moment no one, with the exception of Dawson, grasped the situation. He had grasped it and was wrestling with it as he threw off the rug that covered him where he lay on the sofa—as he stepped across the room—as he placed his hands on his mother’s shoulders and kissed her lightly on the cheek. He had grasped the situation, but he was utterly at a loss to know what to do with it.

“Didn’t you get my telegram?” his mother was saying; “why, that’s funny—I sent one from the hotel quite a time ago, ‘Am worried about sore throat will come to see you’—just ten words exactly.”

Then he found himself introducing his three friends to her: Tommy first, Charlie Bolo second, and Bigelow last, and as he pronounced their names slowly and distinctly, he tried to look ahead and discover what he should do next.

On realising that the impassive Tommy was being presented to her, Mrs. Dawson began to extend her hand toward him; but her impulse collapsed for some reason or other and the movement resulted in nothing more definite than the disclosure of her silk mits.

The three men were so completely outside of any calculations she had made before knocking on her son’s door, that she had nothing to say to them just then, so she turned once more to Dickey with frank adoration and said,—

“I was worried about your throat.”

“I suppose, like the rest of us, Mrs. Dawson, you have found out how seriously he objects to the serious,” ventured Charlie Bolo airily. The smile Mrs. Dawson gave him did not lack sweetness, for she had been looking at Dickey; but it was desperately vague, and Bolo felt that he had made a false start.

“They are taking pretty good care of me, don’t you think?” There was something pallid and heroic about Dickey’s playfulness.

“Oh, this college life!” began Mrs. Dawson, forgetfully. She was trying to recollect a clipping she had once made from a newspaper.

“There’s a lack of woman’s sweeping, without doubt,” grumbled Bigelow jocosely—the music books he had been examining had dirtied his hands.

“Richard, what was that piece I cut from the ‘Weekly’ and sent you last year?” Mrs. Dawson sat down in the chair Dickey pushed toward her. It was a heavy chair of dark wood, and gave Tommy a vicious desire to look at the picture on the mantelpiece. Dickey elaborated the little anecdote to which his mother referred and made the most of it—it was nearly dinner time; the fellows would certainly go soon.

“You have so many books, Richard,” said Mrs. Dawson, looking about the room for the first time.

“Aren’t his shelves attractive,” assented Tommy with enthusiasm. “I think you would approve of everything there too, Mrs. Dawson, with the possible exception of this, which you undoubtedly know enough about to disapprove of.” He laughingly handed her a volume of “Degeneration” from the table. Dawson could have slain him had he not realised that all three fellows must be somewhat bewildered.

“Isn’t it—isn’t it—thick—” faltered Mrs. Dawson.

“What is one to think of a creature like Nordau?” asked Bigelow, theatrically; “that is to say, of course, beyond his exquisitely unconscious sense of humour.” He had made this remark on several previous occasions, and its technique was, in consequence, becoming quite perfect. Mrs. Dawson looked helplessly at Dickey and said nothing. She was at least displaying what Charlie Bolo called “admirable savoir taire.”

When she opened the volume and leaned over to examine the title-page, Tommy gave the photograph on the mantelpiece a surreptitious glance. There was a more or less grotesque resemblance in it to the almost portly, middle-aged original, who was dressed with a quiet absence of taste and answered in a general way Tommy’s description of a superior woman. It was very embarrassing and inexplicable and altogether impossible. Tommy did not understand it—he did not understand anything any more, and only wished to get outside and pinch himself and Charley Bolo and Bigelow.

Dickey Dawson did most of the talking, and achieved thereby a dismal sort of success. His mother had introduced—or rather stumbled on—fallen over—the subject of books, and for a time it was as if Dawson had said to himself,—

“Books! books! what can I say of the origin, development, history, and present condition of books?” For he chattered incessantly about them—his own—Tommy’s—anybody’s. He told funny stories that were not in the least funny, about book agents, and was in the midst of a detailed description of a book-case when he realised he was making a fool of himself and stopped.

“I like reading,” mused Mrs. Dawson, as she mechanically turned the leaves of “Degeneration.” “I think it cultivates the observation.”

“I feel sometimes that it would be more advisable to cultivate blindness than observation,” answered Tommy. He was becoming reckless and got up to go.

Mrs. Dawson’s lips parted to say something, but Dickey broke in with,—

“I wish one of you fellows would kindly stop at the stable and send round a cab. It is too late for my mother to go back to town in the car.”

A protest from Mrs. Dawson seemed imminent, but she apparently thought better of it and returned to the book.

The getting away was difficult, but not nearly so difficult as staying any longer would have been. They chirped “goodbyes,” and “get well soons,” and “so glad to have met yous,” galore, and Bigelow felt waxing within him a new and passionate love for his own family, who were all decently dead. Then they echoed off through a long corridor. After they had gone Mrs. Dawson said nothing for several minutes, and Dickey made a noise with the fire.

“They’re queer young men,” she finally reflected aloud. “Do you like them very much, Richard?”

“Oh, yes,” answered Dickey, indifferently, “you get to like people you see a great deal, I imagine.” He sat on the arm of his mother’s chair and held one of his mother’s hands and kissed it.

“I wonder if you get to dislike people you don’t see much of,” said Mrs. Dawson. She was turning the leaves of her book without stopping to look at them.

“Not if you ever truly loved them,” answered Dickey, tenderly drawing nearer to her and laying his cheek against hers. He was almost overdoing the thing.

“Not if you ever truly loved them, I suppose,” thoughtfully repeated his mother with more intelligence than Dickey had ever given her credit for.

Then she began to turn the leaves of the book all over again.

WOLCOTT THE MAGNIFICENT

I

“IN some way or other it came to the notice of Barrows, the Recording Secretary, that Ernest McGaw was literally starving. The Secretary, being a person of appreciation, immediately gave the man food.

“I’m a horribly busy creature,” he said to McGaw; “but if you’ll come round to dinner with me at the Colonial Club this evening, we can talk about things.” Of course McGaw went and dined—for the first time in months; for two weeks he had been keeping himself half alive on oatmeal that he cooked in a shallow tin apparatus, over the lamp he studied by.

The Secretary had ridden a bicycle that afternoon, and seemed half famished himself, which soothed McGaw’s raw, quivering sensibilities from the first. Then, besides, Barrows was probably the most genial, natural, receptive, unacademic person that ever answered to an official name. So afterwards, when they went into an unoccupied room upstairs, and the Secretary smoked a cigar, it was more than easy—it was comforting—for McGaw to tell him the whole squalid little tragedy. There was nothing particularly new in it to the Secretary, since he was a gentleman who spent his life in making the struggle easier for men who tried to go through college with a capital consisting of fourteen cents and a laudable ambition. Youth and bitterness in combination were some of the materials he dealt in. Barrows could have told the story of McGaw’s pinched, colourless existence much better than McGaw could; yet for an hour or more he listened, questioned, discussed, and was moved. Later, when he and McGaw parted in the Yard, the Secretary, before going to bed, wrote a carefully thought-out letter to Sears Wolcott 2^nd, of the sophomore class.

Sears Wolcott got the letter the next evening, when he stopped a moment in Claverly, on his way from the training table to his club,—that is to say, to one of his clubs. He was a member of two, besides, naturally, the Institute, of whose privileges, by the way, he rarely availed himself. After dining at the training table with his class crew, he usually dropped in at his nearest club to smoke the one pipeful allowed him by his captain. To-night, however, Barrows’ letter put him in such a bad temper that he forgot about his pipe, looked sullen, and spoke to no one. Wolcott was a very big boy; when he was angry, he seemed to swell and swell until everything in the vicinity got out of drawing. Nobody but Haydock had even noticed him come in; the others were too absorbed in drinking their coffee and chattering about the class races. Haydock’s greeting, “How is The Magnificent One this evening?” did not meet with the reception that encourages further pleasantries. Haydock was the only other man in the club who was not talking as fast and as loud as he knew how. But his quiet was as different from The Magnificent One’s as the placid stillness of a summer evening differs from the awful silence in which one waits for a funnel-shaped cloud to mature. Haydock had a big cigar in one hand and a little coffee-cup in the other. He was thinking that a good room in a good club, with its dark walls, and all its leather chairs and divans and rugs, with its magazines and convenient lights to read them by, with its absence of personal individuality, was, especially just after dinner, the most satisfactory spot in the world. Even the background of cheerful noise was agreeable. “As long as you’re not called on to help make it,” added Haydock to himself, as one of the talkers detached himself from the others, and, flourishing a paper in his face, called out:—

“Who wants to subscribe to the Prospect Union?”

Wolcott reached for the nearest newspaper, and buried himself in it; he couldn’t endure Ellis.

“Who wants to subscribe to the Prospect Union? Only a dollar,” repeated Ellis, wiggling his subscription list before Wolcott’s eyes.

“What the devil is the Prospect Union?” growled Wolcott. He crumpled the “Transcript” and tossed it back on the table.

“Why, don’t you know?” asked Ellis, in genuine surprise. “I’ve taught geography there for two years.”

Wolcott snapped back a single word. It was neither a pretty word nor a refined one; the mildest significance one could attach to it was that Wolcott was scarcely in sympathy with Ellis or anything that was his.

“The Prospect Union,” explained Haydock, in the deliberate way that was so often taken seriously, “is a most admirable educational institution, carried on in Cambridgeport by the Harvard undergraduate. It is elaborately designed to make the lower classes—the labouring man—dissatisfied with his station in life. I am proud to say, that I once went there every Friday night for six months to teach two bricklayers, three dry-goods clerks, and a nigger how to appreciate the beautiful works of the late Mr. Keats. I spoiled their lives, and they all love me. Allow me, in my humble way, to help the cause.” He rolled a silver dollar the length of the table to Ellis. Ellis smiled, and put the money in his pocket; he considered Haydock a very “unmoral” person indeed, but liked him, and hoped that some day he would make something of himself.

“That’s very nice—now who’s the next patron?” the philanthropist went on, earnestly. “The Prospect Union is really a mighty fine thing. Even if the men down there don’t learn very much out of books, they can come there and see us,” he had almost unnoticeably emphasised the “us.”

“My God!” said Wolcott, slowly. The words and the way he sized up Ellis, from top to toe, were heavy with a sort of thick-headed contempt. “They can go there and look at you, can they?” Wolcott muttered the unrefined word again. Then he got up with an enormous stretch, yawned, looked at Ellis once more, and laughed, as he went out of the room.

Of the lesser brutalities, a contemptuous laugh is, perhaps, the most brutal of all. Ellis’s thin face reddened. There was silence until the outer door slammed.

“Damn such a man!” declared Ellis, in a loud whisper. This was bold language for him to speak. Later in the night, he woke up and thought about it.

“Oh, I wouldn’t,” protested Haydock, mildly. “He’s so magnificent.”

“Well, I can’t see it!” Ellis was smarting; but he couldn’t relieve himself with the appropriate sharp retort; it didn’t come to him until later on, in bed. “No one has any right to be such a hog,—especially in a club. Besides, I wasn’t talking to him in particular. He needn’t have subscribed, if he didn’t want to; I never expected he would, although almost every one else has. What’s a dollar anyhow?” he shrugged his shoulders.

“Yes, what is it?” piped a tiny person, trying to relieve the tension, from the other side of the table. “I haven’t seen one since the first of last February.”

“No, but seriously,” demanded Ellis,—he was always demanding something seriously,—“what do you think of a man who does things like that, not only once, but every day—all the time?”

“Well, what did he do?” Haydock was never unprepared to take the other side of any argument in which Ellis engaged. “In the first place, he came into the club so quietly that no one but me noticed him. He sat down and read his mail, and didn’t join in the clatter about the class races, because, knowing something about the subject, what the rest of you fellows had to say probably didn’t interest him; and he isn’t a talkative person, ever. Well, then you tried to get him to subscribe to that foolish night school for æsthetic butchers. I confess his answer was not—not exactly urbane. But it’s just possible that your request was ill-timed.”

“Don’t you think that’s one trouble with Sears?” piped the tiny one, who had become interested. “He always gives you the feeling that everything you say is ‘ill-timed’!”

“The great, big, angry bull!” added Ellis. “And just the other day,” he went on, suddenly remembering another of Wolcott’s atrocities, “he took a letter away from Billy Bemis, held him off with one hand and began to read it,—right out loud in the club; and when Billy snatched it away, Wolcott picked him up and threw him clear across the room on to the divan, and almost broke his back. Now I don’t think that any man who pretends to be a gentleman—”

“Oh, write a letter to the ‘Crimson’ about it—” yelled some one who, though trying to read in the next room, apparently could not help following the discussion.

“He was probably feeling his oats a little that day,” suggested Haydock, placidly. “Why shouldn’t he? He’s just like a fine stallion snorting around a ten-acre lot.”

“Feeling his oats, yes,—that’s all right,” sniffed Ellis. “I suppose he was feeling his oats when he captained his class eleven, and used to curse the men out until everybody talked about it; that is, he cursed out the men who were smaller than himself—if it wasn’t worth his while to keep on the right side of them.”

“For Heaven’s sake shut up!” came from the other room, a trifle impatiently.

“Aren’t we just a little harsh?” asked some one who had been listening without joining in.

“Don’t repeat things like that about Sears, Johnny, even if you like to believe them,” said Haydock, simply. Haydock always seemed a little older—less haphazard in his words—than his contemporaries, and never so much so as when repressing what had once been a temper of the most flaming kind. Ellis—limited, conscientious, uncompromising—created countless occasions for such repression. He was a pale tissue of all the virtues. His sobriety was the kind that drove men to the gutter; his chastity lowered temperatures. Once at a small dinner he inadvertently got drunk and became so austere that the fellows went home. To-night, in running down a member of the club at the club, he had more than irritated Haydock. And then—which in this instance was to the point—the member had been Wolcott. As a matter of fact, Haydock liked Wolcott as he liked very few people. But even if one wasn’t fond of The Magnificent One, he thought, there were so many people all over the college who spent a generous portion of their time in cursing him,—men to whom “Sears Wolcott” was the eponym of snob, and purse-proud arrogance,—that in not sticking up for him, or, at least, in not knowing what was really fine in him, one missed a rare chance of judging by standards other than those of Thomas, Richard, and Henry. Wolcott was a snob, of course; but then he never denied the fact,—he even volunteered the information at times. And there’s hope for that kind of a snob, thought Haydock.

The club—which had a characteristic expression for almost every hour of the day—was beginning to lose what Haydock always thought of as its “just-after-dinner look.” The men had finished their coffee; some of them strolled off to their rooms to grind; others hurried in town to the theatre; two were playing cards rather solemnly in a corner; on the divan, a worn-out athlete had fallen asleep over a comic paper. Haydock finished his cigar and went across to his room in Claverly.

At ten o’clock,—Wolcott’s bedtime when in training,—Haydock lit a pipe and knocked on The Magnificent One’s door at the other end of the long corridor. His coming at that hour was such a matter of course, that the door had been left hospitably unlatched as usual.

“How was the rowing to-day?” he asked. The question, also, was a matter of course.

“Damned hard work!” Wolcott was leisurely undressing and dropping his clothes wherever he happened to be when they came off. “About ten racing starts, then down to the Basin and up to the Brighton abattoir and back. I’m tired.”

“And just a dash peevish, I believe.” Haydock sat down on the floor, and lit the shavings and kindling wood in the fireplace. Wolcott’s rooms were always as fresh and cold as the weather permitted.

“Oh, Ellis is such a God awful fool,—I’d break his face if he was bigger!” Wolcott looked at the fire a moment, and thoughtfully stroked one of his bare arms. “I got this, to-night.” He took a letter from the mantelpiece and dropped it into Haydock’s lap. Haydock read it while The Magnificent One got into his pyjamas before the fire. The letter had nothing whatever to do with Ellis. Not that Haydock supposed it had; logical sequence in any two of Wolcott’s remarks always surprised him. It was a tactfully worded appeal from Barrows, the Recording Secretary, telling, with simple realism that somehow or other stayed by one after the letter was back in its envelope, of a fine, keen, scholarly fellow in the sophomore class who had been found, literally starving, a stone’s throw from the College Yard.

“What do you think, Boy?” asked Wolcott, indifferently.

“I wonder who it is,” mused Haydock.

The Secretary’s omission of the man’s name hadn’t interested Wolcott in the least.

“Why didn’t he keep away, damn his soul?” he said.

“Well, he’s here,—that’s the main thing.”

“And Barrows wants me to give him a yacht and some polo ponies, and keep him in cigars and golf sticks.”

Haydock made an inarticulate sound of assent between puffs. He knew perfectly well that Wolcott wanted his advice, that in his characteristic way he was asking it. He also knew, for his liking was an intelligent one, how to give it.

“Well, I call it pretty nervy,” grumbled Sears.

“Oh, yes—yes—it’s nervy.” One simply had to agree with Wolcott in all minor points in order to get anywhere.

“I don’t like to have my leg pulled any more than anybody else does.”

“No, I shouldn’t think you would. But I imagine they’d have difficulty if they tried to play any little games like that with you,” Haydock added, confidently.

No one objects to being talked to this way by a slightly older person who is no fool himself.

“I’d like to see them try!” growled the other.

“They know better.”

“What do you call that, then?” Wolcott pointed with his toe to the letter in Haydock’s lap.

“Oh—that!” Haydock’s manner was most off-hand, “that’s merely the penalty of prominence and wealth. It’s tiresome, of course, this having to come up to the scratch all your life. You know—sometimes I’m mighty glad I’m not so powerful as you are—not in a position to do as much for people, because I think—of course you never can tell—but I think I’d be the kind of person to try to do it every now and then.”

“This sort of thing would be perfect fruit for you, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m inclined to think the poor devil would stop starving for a while.”

“How much would you give him, old Haystack, if you weren’t such a dirty beggar yourself?” After absorbing a certain amount of Haydock’s flattery, Wolcott always began to radiate a sort of bantering amiability.

“Who—I? Oh, I don’t know! You can’t very well send fifteen or twenty dollars, and let it go at that, I suppose; that’s too easy. I’d fix up some scheme with the Secretary,—he knows all about that kind of thing,—and keep the creature going; pay on the instalment plan for thirty or forty years,” he laughed, “you know, the way people do when they buy a piano or a set of Kipling—or any old thing.”

This was about as far as Haydock dared to go. He often wondered how Wolcott could be induced to interest himself in something along the lines suggested by Barrows, the Secretary; it was the incalculable benefit such an interest would be to Wolcott that made him wish it; and he had, as often, given the problem up. For Wolcott took the initiative in nothing; he never had known the necessity that compels one to. The only effort he was ever called on to make was that of selection. It seemed as if everything in the world—the Secretary’s letter included—came tumbling to crave approval at the boy’s feet. And he approved of so little—least of all, of the people (Ellis was one of them) who butted their heads against the mighty wall of his prejudices. Haydock, who, perhaps, knew him better than any one did, was occasionally nimble enough to clamber over the barrier. When he failed, he consoled himself with the thought that, unlike Ellis and some others, his head was still intact. For, in an odd sort of way that suggested the congeniality of mind and matter, the two were excellent friends.

“Well, ‘I must go to bed and get strong for dear old Harvard,’” announced Wolcott, abruptly. He had once read that sentence in a college story, and had quoted it, with intense amusement, every night since.

Haydock leaned against the doorway, while The Magnificent One slid into bed.

“Bed’s a good place, isn’t it?” said Wolcott, cuddling his sunburnt face in the pillow. “Oh, Haystack,—I want to get up at seven,—leave a note on my boots as you go out.”

“Have you found any one yet to tutor you in History 19?” asked Haydock, from the other room, where he was scribbling a notice for the janitor.

“Yes, I start in to-morrow.”

“I didn’t know anybody was tutoring in that course this year. Who did you get?”

“I don’t know his name. Oh, yes, I do, too. He’s a freak named McGaw; wears a black cutaway coat with braid round the edge, and looks nervous. Good-night, old Haystack. Don’t forget the lights.”

Before Haydock made the room dark, he took the Secretary’s letter from the mantelpiece, and put it on Wolcott’s desk, where it could not very well be overlooked.

II

“IF the primitive custom—in vogue, I believe, at certain colleges—of choosing by vote “the most popular man,” “the most unpopular man,” “the handsomest man,” and so on, were numbered among Harvard traditions (thank Heaven, it isn’t!), Wolcott would never have been elected to adorn the first of these distinctions. He would have had a large and enthusiastic backing for the second, and some scattering ballots for the third. Yet the material perquisites of popularity were his, for Wolcott presented the thought-compelling spectacle of a disliked person, to whom every social honour was paid with as much regularity as if he had come to Cambridge with a pocketful of promissory notes that called for them—to be drawn out and cashed when due. One never said of Wolcott, as is said of some fellows, “He made the first ten of the Dicky”—implying a certain amount of enterprise or discretion. The assertion that he was a first ten man required no implication; it was enough, for it was so ordained. Now this fact is one of significance,—of greater significance than any one, not a Harvard man, is likely to attach to the sophomore society (and it is a wise Harvard child that knows the mother of its soul). But just why Wolcott—arrogant, combative, unresponsive—had been a first ten man, is for a treatise, not a story. It is sufficient to say that he was one, and that it never occurred to his numerous acquaintances to question his individual fitness for that honour, however much they lamented the system that gave it to him. Wolcott himself never questioned it. Only in the circumstance of his having been omitted from the chosen first, would the subject have seemed to him in any way markworthy. His attitude from babyhood towards anything worth having, that he didn’t already possess, had been one of imminent proprietorship. Once when his nurse, holding him up to the window, had asked in the peculiarly imbecile way of nurses, “Whose moon is that, Searsy?” Searsy had replied, as one compelled to explain the obvious, “That’s Mr. Langdon Wolcott’s moon.” The gentleman referred to was his father. This attitude Searsy had practised through the nursery, and the fitting school, until, by the time he went to college, it was an exceedingly muscular, well-developed posture indeed. And that’s partly why he was called Wolcott The Magnificent. The other reason provoked less difference of opinion; he really was magnificent. Everybody who knew about arms, and legs, and chests, and things, agreed that he was. And as the people who don’t know about such things always have a deep admiration—either frank or sneaking—for them, Sears’s imperial subtitle was rarely disputed. As early as the close of his freshman year, the name spread to town. Girls with opera-glasses used to sit at back dining-room windows on the water-side of Beacon Street to see him row past with his crew. They took the same tender interest in the way the April sun and wind tanned his back, that a freshman takes in colouring a meerschaum pipe. In years gone by, Wolcott and these young ladies had—in the good Boston fashion—cemented their acquaintance with the mud that pies are made of. But wonderful things had happened since then; a lot of little girls, with piano legs and pigtails, had put their skirts down and their hair up; a chunky, dictatorial boy had become very magnificent.

Altogether, Sears was not the sort of fellow over whose welfare one would expect to find many people worrying. There would seem to be but little cause for anxiety about a man who knew how to spend an enormous allowance sensibly,—if selfishly,—who, on the whole, preferred to be in training most of the year rather than out of it, who rarely fell below what he called a “gentleman’s mark” in any of his studies, and who, as a matter of course, was given every social distinction in the power of the undergraduate world to bestow; yet there were several very intelligent human beings, who, when they thought about Sears—and they thought a good deal about him every day—did not meditate so much on what he had, as on what he so abundantly lacked. They wished that things were different. And Haydock used to say that worrying was merely wishing two or three times in succession that things were different. One of these persons was Sears’s eldest sister, another of them was Haydock.

Miss Wolcott was the sort of Boston girl that dresses like a penwiper, and becomes absorbed in associated charities after a second lugubrious season. In the patois of her locality, she was called a “pill;” a girl whom Harvard men carefully avoid until it is rumoured that her family shortly intends to “give something” in the paternal pill-box. Whereas, prior to her renunciation, dozens of Harvard men had been part of Miss Wolcott’s responsibility, her concern was now centred upon one, namely, her brother Sears. She and Haydock, unknown to each other, had found the same reason for wishing things different. After making each other’s acquaintance, they worried congenially in chorus. In their opinion Sears was not getting out of Harvard College the greatest things Harvard College had to offer. They did not expect him to see them,—that would have been demanding too much; the undergraduate who sees them is an extremely occasional, precocious, and, as a rule, objectionable person. But they wished earnestly that the boy might, somehow or other, be put in the way of feeling them—of realising, even dimly, that the world to which he had lent himself for four years was something besides two small clubs, a fashionable dormitory, and a class crew. They wanted him to know, for instance, that the steady, commonplace stream that flowed to five o’clock dinners in Memorial Hall, the damp, throat-clearing, tired mobs that packed Lower Massachusetts on wet Monday afternoons and smelled, the indefinite hundreds that sat at dusk on the grass in front of Holworthy to hear the Glee Club sing, were as necessary, as real, as himself. They thought that such a conviction, or even such a suspicion, would make Sears a bigger and a better man. They believed—knowing, as they did, how inevitable was the general scheme of his future—that if the glimmer of these things did not dawn now, when the horizon that bounded them all ended with the college fence, it never would. And they were perfectly right.

“Searsy is really such a splendid fellow,” Miss Wolcott would say to Haydock, with enthusiasm, “I want him to do something.” Haydock, too, wanted him to do something. But they never got much beyond that, although they had many satisfactory discussions on the subject on Sunday afternoons, while Mrs. Wolcott and the younger sisters (who weren’t failures) made tea and conversation for frock-coated youths in the next room. It was perplexing to know just where to begin with a person like Sears. Miss Wolcott laboured under a disadvantage; Sears was not the person to take suggestions from a failure. Haydock was more to the point. But he and Wolcott were of an age and a class; and it’s so easy to be a bore.

The Secretary’s letter struck Haydock as one of the few distinctly opportune requests for money he had ever heard of. After he had put out Wolcott’s lights, he walked up and down his own room, smoking his pipe and thinking it over. There were several possible outcomes to the little situation. An act of charity may be ignored, it may be performed with the enthusiasm with which one pays a bill for a suit of clothes long since worn out, or it may stir up a confusion of fine emotions that have lain quiescent in one, like the dregs of a comfortable bottle. The latter kind of charity is the sin-coverer. The chances were that Wolcott would never think of Barrows and his man again. It was just possible that he might send them a cheque for fifty dollars, and be unbearable for the next three days. But as for his being in any way stirred, awakened, made to know what he was doing, to wonder what he might do, Haydock felt, away down deep somewhere, that it was quite hopeless. And for that reason, the mind of man being so contrived, his thoughts dwelt that night, as they often did, on an apotheosised Wolcott, a Wolcott who justified himself, who didn’t disappoint, a Wolcott whose sympathies and judgments were as broad as his shoulders, a Wolcott, in short, whose inside was brother to his outside.