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The Guarded Heights

by Wadsworth Camp · English · Gutenberg #33733 · 685,124 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Guarded Heights

Author: Wadsworth Camp


        
Release date: September 15, 2010 [eBook #33733]
                Most recently updated: July 22, 2011

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GUARDED HEIGHTS ***




Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Mary Meehan and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net









                           THE GUARDED HEIGHTS

                            BY WADSWORTH CAMP


FRONTISPIECE
BY C. D. MITCHELL

GARDEN CITY, N. Y., AND TORONTO
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1921

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

COPYRIGHT 1920, BY P. F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY


[Illustration: "GEORGE WATCHED SYLVIA LIFT HER RIDING CROP, HER FACE
DISCLOSING A TEMPER TO MATCH HIS OWN"]




CONTENTS


PART I OAKMONT

PART II PRINCETON

PART III THE MARKET-PLACE

PART IV THE FOREST

PART V THE NEW WORLD




THE GUARDED HEIGHTS




PART I

OAKMONT


I

George Morton never could be certain when he first conceived the
preposterous idea that Sylvia Planter ought to belong to him. The full
realization, at any rate, came all at once, unexpectedly, destroying his
dreary outlook, urging him to fantastic heights, and, for that matter,
to rather curious depths.

It was, altogether, a year of violent change. After a precarious
survival of a rural education he had done his best to save his father's
livery business which cheap automobiles had persistently undermined. He
liked that, for he had spent his vacations, all his spare hours, indeed,
at the stable or on the road, so that by the time the crash came he knew
more of horses and rode better than any hunting, polo-playing gentleman
he had ever seen about that rich countryside. Nor was there any one near
his own age who could stand up to him in a rough-and-tumble argument.
Yet he wondered why he was restless, not appreciating that he craved
broader worlds to conquer. Then the failure came, and his close relation
with the vast Planter estate of Oakmont, and the arrival of Sylvia, who
disclosed such worlds and heralded the revolution.

That spring of his twentieth year the stable and all its stock went to
the creditors, and old Planter bought the small frame house just outside
the village, on the edge of his estate, and drew his boundary around it.
He was willing that the Mortons should remain for the present in their
old home at a nominal rent, and after a fashion they might struggle
along, for George's mother was exceptionally clever at cleansing fine
laces and linens; the estate would have work for his father from time to
time; as for himself, Planter's superintendent suggested, there were new
and difficult horses at Oakmont and a scarcity of trustworthy grooms.
George shook his head.

"Sure, I want a job," he admitted, "but not as old Planter's servant, or
anybody else's. I want to be my own boss."

George hadn't guessed that his reputation as a horseman had travelled as
far as the big house. The superintendent explained that it had, and
that, living at home, merely helping out for the summer, he would be
quite apart from the ordinary men around the stables. His parents sensed
a threat. They begged him to accept.

"We've got to do as Old Planter wants at the start or he'll put us out,
and we're too old to make another home."

So George went with his head up, telling himself he was doing Planter a
favour; but he didn't like it, and almost at once commenced to plan to
get away, if he could, without hurting his parents. Then Sylvia, just
home from her last year at school, came into the stable toward the end
of his day's work. Her overpowering father was with her, and her
brother, Lambert, who was about George's age. She examined interestedly
the horse reserved for her, and one or two others of which she was
envious.

George wanted to stare at her. He had only glimpsed her casually and at
a distance in summers gone by. Now she was close, and he knew he had
never seen anything to match her slender, adolescent figure, or her
finely balanced face with its intolerant eyes and its frame of black
hair.

"But," he heard her say to her father in a flexible contralto voice, "I
don't care to bother you or Lambert every time I want to ride."

An argument, unintelligible to George, flowed for a moment. Then Old
Planter's tones, bass and authoritative, filled the stable.

"Come here, young Morton!"

George advanced, not touching his cap, to remind the big man that there
was a difference between him and the other stable men, and that he
didn't like that tone.

"You are a very dependable horseman," the great millionaire said. "I can
trust you. When Miss Sylvia wants to ride alone you will go with her and
see that she has no accidents. During your hours here you will be
entirely at her disposal."

Instead of arousing George's anger that command slightly thrilled him.

"So you're Morton," Sylvia said, indifferently. "I shall expect you
always to be convenient."

He ventured to look at last, pulling off his cap.

"You can depend on it," he said, a trifle dazed by her beauty.

She went out. Her father and her brother followed, like servitors of a
sort themselves. George had no sense of having allowed his position
there to be compromised. He only realized that he was going to see that
lovely creature every day, would be responsible for her safety, would
have a chance to know her.

"A peach!" a groom whispered. "You're lucky, Georgie boy."

George shrugged his shoulders.

"Maybe so."

Yet he agreed. She was a peach, and he took no pains to conceal his
appraisal from his parents that evening.

"Seen Old Planter's daughter yet?"

His father, a drooping, tired figure in the dusk of the little porch,
nodded.

"I haven't," his mother called from the kitchen. "Is she as pretty as
she was last summer?"

"Pretty!" he scoffed. "Who was the prettiest woman in the world?"

"I don't know," came the interested voice from the house. "Maybe the
Queen of Sheba."

"Then," George said, "she'd have cried her eyes out if she had seen Old
Planter's girl."

The elder Morton took his pipe from his mouth.

"Young men like you," he said, slowly, "haven't any business looking at
girls like Old Planter's daughter."

George laughed carelessly.

"Even a cat can look at a queen."

And during the weeks that followed he did look, too persistently, never
dreaming where his enthusiasm was leading him. Occasionally he would
bring her brother's horse around with hers or her father's. At such
times he would watch them ride away with a keen disappointment, as if he
had been excluded from a pleasure that had become his right. Lambert,
however, was away a good deal, and Old Planter that summer fought
rheumatic attacks, which he called gout, so that Sylvia, for the most
part, rode alone through remote bridle-paths with George at her heels
like a well-trained animal.

He knew he could not alter that all at once; she would have it no other
way. She only spoke to him, really, about the condition of the horses,
or the weather--never a word conceivably personal; and every day he
looked at her more personally, let his imagination, without knowing it,
stray too far. At first he merely enjoyed being with her; then he
appreciated that a sense of intimacy had grown upon him, and he was
troubled that she did not reciprocate, that their extended companionship
had not diminished at all the appalling distance dividing them. There
was something, moreover, beyond her beauty to stimulate his interest.
She appeared not to know fear, and once or twice he ventured to reprove
her, enjoying her angry reactions. She even came to the stables, urging
him to let her ride horses that he knew were not safe.

"But you ride them," she would persist.

"When I find a horse I can't ride, Miss Sylvia, I guess I'll have to
take up a new line. If your father would come and say it's all
right----"

Even then he failed to grasp the fact that he guarded her for his own
sake rather more than for her father's.

He nearly interfered when he heard her cry to her brother as they
started off one morning:

"I'm going to ride harder from now on, Lambert. I've got to get fit for
next winter. Coming out will take a lot of doing."

"If she rides any harder," he muttered, "she'll break her silly neck."

It angered him that she never spoke to him in that voice, with that easy
manner. Perhaps his eagerness to be near her had led her to undervalue
him. Somehow he would change all that, and he wanted her to stop calling
him "Morton," as if he had been an ordinary groom, or an animal, but he
would have to go slowly. Although he didn't realize the great fact then,
he did know that he shrank from attempting anything that would take her
away from him.

It was her harder riding, indeed, that opened his eyes, that ushered in
the revolution.

It happened toward the close of a mid-July afternoon. Mud whirled from
her horse's hoofs, plentifully sprinkling her humble guardian.

"Now what the devil's she up to?" he thought with a sharp fear.

She turned and rode at a gallop for a hedge, an uneven, thorny barrier
that separated two low meadows. He put spurs to his horse, shouting:

"Hold up, Miss Sylvia! That's a rotten take-off."

Flushed and laughing, she glanced over her shoulder.

"Got to try it to prove it, Morton."

He realized afterward that it was as near intimacy as she had ever come.

He saw her horse refuse, straightening his knees and sliding in the
marshy ground. He watched Sylvia, with an ease and grace nearly
unbelievable, somersault across the hedge and out of sight in the meadow
beyond.

"Miss Sylvia! Are you hurt?"

No answer. He sprang from his horse, leaving it free to graze with hers.
He stormed through the hedge, his heart choking him. She lay on her
side, quite motionless, the high colour fled from her cheeks, her hair
half down. Although the soft ground should have reassured him he was
obsessed by the thought that she might never get up again.

In the warmth of his fear barriers were consumed. Within his horizon
survived just two people, himself and this silent object of an extended,
if unconscious, adoration.

He shrank from learning the truth, yet it was impossible to hesitate. He
had to do what he could.

He approached on tip-toe, knelt, and lifted her until she rested against
him. The contact was galvanic. He became aware of his trembling hands.
Some man, it occurred to him, would touch those curved, slightly parted
lips. Not if he knew it, unless it were himself! He wanted to hear those
lips speak to him as if he were a human being, and not just--Morton. How
could he dream of such things now? He fumbled for her pulse, failed at
first to find it, and became panic-stricken. He shook her, more than
ever alone, facing an irretrievable loss.

"Open your eyes," he begged wildly. "What's the matter with you? Oh, my
God, Miss Sylvia, I can't ever get along without you now."

He glanced haggardly around for water, any means to snatch her back;
then she stirred in his arms, and with his relief came a sickening
return to a peopled and ordered world. He understood he had sprung
headlong with his eyes shut; that his anxiety had dictated phrases he
had had no business to form, that he would not have uttered if she had
been able to hear. Or, good Lord! Had she heard? For she drew herself
convulsively away, the colour rushing back, her eyes opening, and they
held a sort of horror.

"Are you hurt?" he said, trying to read her eyes.

She got to her knees, swaying a trifle.

"I remember. A bit of a fall. Stunned me. That's all. But you said
something, Morton! Will you please repeat that?"

Her eyes, and her voice, which had a new, frightening quality, stung his
quick temper. What he had suffered a moment ago was a little sacred. He
couldn't afford to let her cheapen it one cent's worth.

"I guess I don't need to repeat it," he said. "It was scared out of me,
Miss Sylvia, because I thought--I know it was silly--but I thought you
were dead. I never dreamed you could hear. I'll try to forget it."

He saw her grope in the wet grass at her knees. Scarcely understanding,
he watched her rise, lifting her riding crop, her face disclosing a
temper to match his own.

"You're an impertinent servant," she said. "Well, you'll not forget."

She struck at his face with the crop. He got his hand up just in time,
and caught her wrist.

"Don't you touch me," she whispered.

His jaw went out.

"You'll learn not to be afraid of my touch, and I'm not a servant. You
get that straight."

She struggled, but he held her wrist firmly. The sight of the crop, the
memory of her epithet, thickened his voice, lashed his anger.

"Have it your own way. You say I shan't forget, and I won't. I'm going
after you, and I usually get what I go after. You'll find I'm a human
being, and I'd like to see anybody hit me in the face and get away with
it."

"Let me go! Let me go!"

He released her wrist, dragging the crop from her grasp. He snapped it
in two and flung the pieces aside. The slight noise steadied him. It
seemed symbolic of the snapping of his intended fate. She drew slowly
back, chafing the wrist he had held. Her face let escape the desire to
hurt, to hurt hard.

"Someone else will have the strength," she whispered. "You'll be
punished, you--you--stable boy."

She forced her way blindly through the hedge. Responding to his custom
he started automatically after her to hold her stirrup. She faced him,
raising her hands.

"Keep away from me, you beast!"

Unaided, she sprang into her saddle and started home at a hard gallop.

George glanced around thoughtfully. He was quite calm now. The familiar
landscape appeared strangely distorted. Was that his temper, or a
reflection from his altered destiny? He didn't know how the deuce he
could do it, but he was going to justify himself. Maybe the real
situation had never been explained to her, and, as the price of her
companionship, he had, perhaps, let her hold him too cheaply; but now he
was going to show her that he was, indeed, instead of a servant, a human
being, capable of making his boasts good.

He picked up the two pieces of her riding crop and thrust them into his
pocket. They impressed him as a necessary souvenir of his humiliation, a
reminder of what he had to do. She had hurt. Oh, Lord! How she had hurt!
He experienced a hot desire to hurt back. The scar could only be healed,
he told himself, if some day he could strike at her beautiful,
contemptuous body as hard as she had just now struck at him.


II

He mounted and pressed his horse, but he had only one or two glimpses of
Sylvia, far ahead, using her spurs, from time to time raising her hand
as if she had forgotten that her crop had been torn from her, broken,
and thrown aside.

Such frantic haste was urged by more than the necessity of escape. What
then, if not to hasten his punishment, to tell her father, her mother,
and Lambert? She had threatened that someone else would have the
strength to give him a thrashing. Probably Lambert. Aside from that how
could they punish a man who had only committed the crime of letting a
girl know that he loved her? All at once he guessed, and he laughed
aloud. They could kick him out. He wanted, above everything else, to be
kicked out of a job where he was treated like a lackey, although he was
told he was nothing of the kind. Expert with horses, doing Old Planter a
favour for the summer! Hadn't she just called him a servant, a stable
boy? He wanted to put himself forever beyond the possibility of being
humiliated in just that way again.

In the stable he found a groom leading Sylvia's horse to a stall.

"Take mine, too, and rub him down, will you?"

The groom turned, staring.

"The nerve! What's up, George?"

"Only," George said, deliberately, "that I've touched my last horse for
money."

"Say! What goes on here? The young missus rides in like a cyclone, and
looking as if she'd been crying. I always said you'd get in trouble with
the boss's daughter. You're too good looking for the ladies,
Georgie----"

"That's enough of that," George snapped. "Scrape him down, and I'll be
much obliged."

He went out, knowing that the other would obey, for as a rule people did
what George wanted. He took a path through the park toward home, walking
slowly, commencing to appreciate the difficulties he had brought upon
himself. His predicament might easily involve his parents. The afternoon
was about done, they would both be there, unsuspecting. It was his duty
to prepare them. He experienced a bitter regret as he crossed the line
that a few months ago had divided their property, their castle, from
Oakmont. Now Old Planter could cross that line and drive them out.

Before George came in sight of the house he heard a rubbing, slapping
noise, and with a new distaste pictured his mother bending over a
washtub, suggesting a different barrier to be leaped. As he entered the
open space back of the house he wanted to kick the tub over, wanted to
see sprawling in the dirt the delicate, intimate linen sent down weekly
from the great house because his mother was exceptionally clever with
such things. To the uncouth music of her labour her broad back rose and
bent rhythmically. His father, wearing soiled clothing, sat on the porch
steps, an old briar pipe in his mouth.

Abruptly his mother's drudgery ceased. She stared. His father rose
stiffly.

"You've got yourself in trouble," he said.

George had not fancied the revolution had unfurled banners so easily
discernible. He became self-conscious. His parents' apprehension made
matters more difficult for him. They, at least, were too old to revolt.

"I suppose I have," he acknowledged shortly.

His father used the tone of one announcing an unspeakable catastrophe.

"You mean you've had trouble with Miss Sylvia."

"George!" his mother cried, aghast. "You've never been impertinent with
Miss Sylvia!"

"She thinks I have," George said, "so it amounts to the same thing."

His father's face twitched.

"And you know Old Planter can put us out of here without a minute's
notice, and where do you think we'd go? How do you think we'd get bread
and butter? You talk up, young man. You tell us what happened."

"I can't," George said, sullenly. "I can't talk about it. You'll hear
soon enough."

"I always said," his mother lamented, "that Georgie wasn't one to know
his place up there."

"Depends," George muttered, "on what my place is. I've got to find that
out. Look! You'll hear now."

A bald-headed figure in livery, one of the house servants, glided toward
them through the shrubbery, over that vanished boundary line, with
nervous haste. George squared his shoulders. The messenger, however,
went straight to the older man.

"Mr. Planter's on his ear, and wants to see you right off in the
library. What you been up to, young Morton?"

George resented the curiosity in the pallid, unintelligent eyes, the
fellow's obvious pleasure in the presence of disaster. It would have
appeased him to grasp those sloping shoulders, to force the grinning
face from his sight. A queer question disturbed him. Had Sylvia felt
something of the sort about him?

"Come on," the elder Morton said. "It's pretty hard at my age. You'll
pay for this, George."

"Old Planter would never be that unfair," George encouraged him.

"Georgie! Georgie!" his mother said when the others were out of sight,
"what have you been up to?"

He walked closer and placed his arm around her shoulders.

"I've been getting my eyes opened," he answered. "I never ought to have
listened to them. I never ought to have gone up there. I did say
something to Miss Sylvia I had no business to. If I'd been one of her
own kind, instead of the son of a livery stable keeper, I'd have got
polite regrets or something. It's made me realize how low I am."

"No," she said with quick maternal passion. "You're not low. Maybe some
day those people'll be no better than we are."

He shook his head.

"I'd rather I was no worse than they are. And I will be. I won't put up
with it. If some people have to be treated like dirt, I'm going to help
do the treating."

"That's no right way of thinking," she warned. "It's money makes the
mare go."

But in Sylvia's case, George admitted, there was other propulsion than
that; something more fragile, and harder to understand or capture for
one's self.

"Don't you worry, I'll make money," he said.

She glanced up quickly.

"Who's that?"

A brisk masculine voice volleyed through the shrubbery:

"Young Morton! I say, young Morton!"

"It's Mr. Lambert," she breathed. "Go quick."

George remembered what Sylvia had said about someone else having the
strength.

"Can't you guess, Ma, what the young lady's brother wants of me?"

The bitterness left his face. His smile was engaging.

"To give me the devil."

"Young Morton! Young Morton!"

"Coming!" he called.

"George," she begged, "don't have any trouble with Mr. Lambert."


III

She watched him with anxious eyes, failing to observe, because she was
his mother, details that informed his boasts with power. His ancestry
of labour had given him, at least, his straight, slender, and unusually
muscular body, and from somewhere had crept in the pride, just now
stimulated, with which he carried it. His wilful, regular features,
moreover, guarded by youth, were still uncoarsened.

He found Lambert Planter waiting beyond the old boundary behind a screen
of bushes, his hands held behind his back. In his face, which had some
of Sylvia's beauty, hardened and enlarged, dwelt the devil George had
foreseen.

George nodded, feeling all at once at ease. He could take care of
himself in an argument with Lambert Planter. No such distances separated
them as had widened beyond measure a little while back between him and
Sylvia. He wondered if that conception sprang from Lambert, or if it
came simply from the fact that they were two men, facing each other
alone; for it was from the first patent that Sylvia had asked her
brother to complete a punishment she had devised as fitting, but which
she had been incapable of carrying out herself. Lambert, indeed, brought
his hands forward, disclosing a whip. It was a trifle in his way as he
took off his coat.

"That's right," George said. "Make yourself comfortable."

"You won't help matters by being impertinent, Morton."

Lambert's voice contrasted broadly with George's round, loud tones.
While, perhaps, not consciously affected, its accents fell according to
the custom of the head master of a small and particular preparatory
school. George crushed his instinct to mock. What the deuce had he
craved ever since his encounter with Sylvia unless it was to be one with
men like Lambert Planter? So all he said was:

"What's the whip for?"

"You know perfectly well," Lambert answered. "There's no possible excuse
for what you said and did this afternoon. I am going to impress that on
you."

"You mean you want a fight?"

"By no means. I wouldn't feel comfortable fighting a man like you. I'd
never dreamed we had such a rotten person on the place. Oh, no, Morton.
I'm going to give you a good horse-whipping."

George's chin went out. His momentary good-humour fled.

"If you touch me with that whip I'm likely to kill you."

Without hesitating Lambert raised the whip. George sprang and got his
hands on it, intent only on avoiding a blow that would have carried the
same unbearable sting as Sylvia's riding crop. Such tactics took Lambert
by surprise. George's two hands against his one on the stock were
victorious. The whip flew to one side. Lambert, flushing angrily,
started after it. George barred his path, raising his fists.

"You don't touch that thing again."

Lambert's indecision, his hands hanging at his sides, hurt George nearly
as much as the lashing would have done. He had to destroy that attitude
of sheer superiority.

"I'm not sure you're a man," he said, thickly, "but you tried to hit me,
so you can put your pretty hands up or take it in the face."

He aimed a vicious blow. Lambert side-stepped and countered. George's
ear rang. He laughed, his self-respect rushing back with the keen joy of
battle. In Lambert's face, stripped of its habitual repression, he
recognized an equal excitement. It was a man's fight, with blood drawn
at the first moment, staining both of them. Lambert boxed skillfully,
and his muscles were hard, but after the first moment George saw
victory, and set out to force it. He looked for fear in the other's eyes
then, and longed to see it, but those eyes remained as unafraid as
Sylvia's until there wasn't left in them much of anything conscious. As
a last chance Lambert clinched, and they went down, fighting like a pair
of furious terriers. George grinned as he felt those eclectic hands
endeavouring in the most brotherly fashion to torture him. He managed to
pin them to the ground. He laughed happily.

"Thought you hated to touch me."

"You fight like a tiger, anyway," Lambert gasped.

"Had enough?"

Lambert nodded.

"I know when I'm through."

George didn't release him at once. His soul expanded with a sense of
power and authority earned by his own effort. It seemed an omen. It
urged him too far.

"Then," he mused, "I guess I'd better let you run home and tell your
father what I've done to you."

"That," Lambert said, "proves I was right, and I'm sorry I fought you."

George tried to think. He felt hot and angry. Was the other, after all,
the better man?

"I take it back," he muttered. "Ought to have had enough sense to know
that a fellow that fights like you's no tattle-tale."

"Thanks, Morton."

George's sense of power grew. He couldn't commence too soon to use it.

"See here, Mr. Planter, I came up here to help with some horses your
people didn't know how to handle, and let myself get shifted to this
other job; but I'm not your father's slave, and anyway I'm getting out."

He increased the pressure on Lambert's arms.

"Just to remind you what we've been fighting about, and that I'm not
your slave, you call me Mr. Morton, or George, just as if I was about as
good as you."

Lambert smiled broadly.

"Will you kindly let me go--George?"

George sprang up, grinning.

"How you feel, Mr. Lam----" He caught himself--"Mr. Planter?"

Lambert struggled to his feet.

"Quite unwell, thanks. I'm sorry you made such a damned fool of yourself
this afternoon. We might have had some pretty useful times boxing
together."

"I'd just as leave tell you," George said, glancing away, "that I never
intended to say it. I didn't realize it myself until it was scared out
of me."

Lambert put on his coat.

"It won't bear talking about."

"It never hit me," George said, huskily, "that even a cat couldn't look
at a queen."

"Perfectly possible," Lambert said as he walked off, feeling his
bruises, "only the queen mustn't see the cat."


IV

George went, obliterating as best he could the souvenirs of battle.
Water, unfortunately, was a requisite, and the nearest was to be found
at his own home. His mother gasped.

"You did! After what I said!"

At the pump he splashed cold water over his face and arms.

"I thrashed him," he spluttered.

"I guess that settles it for your father and me."

"Young Planter won't tell anybody," George assured her. "Although I
don't see how he's going to get away with it unless he says he was run
over by an automobile and kicked by a mule."

"What's come over you?" she demanded. "You've gone out of your head."

He dodged her desire for details. As Lambert had said, the thing
wouldn't bear talking about. For the first time in his life he stood
alone, and whatever he accomplished from now on would have to be done
alone.

He saw his father striding toward them, the anxious light gone from his
eyes. George experienced a vast relief.

"Father looks a little more cheerful," he commented, drying his face.

"Get supper, Ma," the man said as he came up.

She hesitated, held by her curiosity, while he turned on George.

"I don't wonder you couldn't open your mouth to me. You're to be out of
here to-morrow."

"I'd made up my mind to that."

"And Old Planter wants to see you at nine o'clock to-night."

"Since you and Ma," George said, "seem on such good terms with him I
suppose I'll have to go."

"Thank the Lord we are," his father grumbled. "I wouldn't have blamed
him if he had packed us all off. He was more than fair. I've looked
after you so far, but you'll have to shift for yourself now."

"And the only thing I didn't like about it," George mused, "was leaving
you and Ma."

"What did he say to Miss Sylvia?" his mother whispered.

"Said he couldn't get along without her, and was going to have her."

He might have been speaking of one who had ventured to impersonate the
deity.

"And he touched her! Put his arms around her!"

The horror in his mother's face grew.

"Georgie! Georgie! What could you have been thinking of?"

He leaned against the pump.

"I'm thinking now," he said, softly, "it's sort of queer a man's father
and mother believe there's any girl in the world too good for their
son."

"Lots of them," his father snapped. "Sylvia Planter most of all."

"Oh, yes," his mother agreed.

He straightened.

"Then listen," he said, peremptorily. "I don't think so. I told her I
was going to have her, and I will. Just put that down in your books.
I'll show the lot of you that I'm as good as she is, as good as
anybody."

The late sun illuminated the purpose in his striking face.

"Impertinent servant!" he cried. "Stable boy! Beast! It's pretty rough
to make her marry all that. It's my only business from now on."


V

He went to his room, leaving his parents aghast. With a nervous hurry he
rid himself of his riding breeches, his puttees, his stock.

"That," he told himself, "is the last time I shall ever wear anything
like livery."

When he had dressed in one of his two suits of ordinary clothing he took
the broken riding crop and for a long time stared at it as though the
venomous souvenir could fix his resolution more firmly. Once his hand
slipped to the stock where Sylvia's fingers had so frequently tightened.
He snatched his hand away. It was too much like an unfair advantage, a
stolen caress.

"Georgie! Georgie!"

His mother's voice drifted to him tentatively.

"Come and get your supper."

He hid the broken crop and went out. His father glanced disapproval.

"You'd do better to wear Old Planter's clothes while you can. It's
doubtful when you'll buy any more of your own."

George sat down without answering. Since his return from the ride that
afternoon his parents and he had scarcely spoken the same language, and
by this time he understood there was no possible interpreter. It made
him choke a little over his food.

The others were content to share his silence. His father seemed only
anxious to have him away; but his mother, he fancied, looked at him with
something like sorrow.

Afterward he fled from that nearly voiceless scrutiny and paced one of
the park paths, counting the minutes until he could answer Old Planter's
summons. He desired to have the interview over so that he could snap
every chain binding him to Oakmont, every chain save the single one
Sylvia's contempt had unwittingly forged. He could not, moreover, plan
his immediate future with any assurance until he knew what the great man
wanted.

"Only to make me feel a little worse," he decided. "What else could he
do?"

What, indeed, could a man of Planter's wealth and authority not do? It
was a disturbing question.

Through the shrubbery the lights of the house gleamed. The moonlight
outlined the immense, luxurious mass. Never once had he entered the
great house. He was eager to study the surrounding in which women like
Sylvia lived, which she, to an extent, must reflect.

In that serene moonlight he realized that his departure, agreeable and
essential as it was, would make it impossible for him during an
indefinite period to see that slender, adolescent figure, or the
features, lovely and intolerant, that had brought about this revolution
in his life. He acknowledged now that he had looked forward each day to
those hours of proximity and contemplation; and there had been from the
first, he guessed, adoration in his regard.

It was no time to dwell on the sentimental phase of his situation. He
despised himself for still loving her. His approaching departure he must
accept gladly, since he designed it as a means of coming closer--close
enough to hurt.

He wondered if he would have one more glimpse of her, perhaps in the
house. He glanced at his watch. He could go at last. He started for the
lights. Would he see her?

At the corner of the building he hesitated before a fresh dilemma. His
logical entrance lay through the servants' quarters, but he squared his
shoulders and crossed the terrace. It was impossible now that he should
ever enter the house in which she lived by the back door.

It was a warm night, so the door stood open. The broad spaces of the
hall, the rugs, the hangings, the huge chairs, the portraits in gilt
frames against polished walls, the soft, rosy light whose source he
failed to explore, seemed mutely to reprove his presumption.

He rang. He did not hear the feet of the servant who answered. The vapid
man that had trotted for his father that afternoon suddenly shut off his
view.

"You must wear rubbers," George said.

"What you doing here? Go 'round to the back."

"Mr. Planter," George explained, patiently, "sent for me."

"All right. All right. Then go 'round to the back where you belong."

George reached out, caught the other's shoulder, and shoved him to one
side. While the servant gave a little cry and struggled to regain his
balance, George walked in. A figure emerged painfully from an easy chair
in the shadows by the fireplace.

"What's all this, Simpson?"

The polished voice gave the impression of overcoming an impediment,
probably a swollen lip.

"It's young Morton, Mr. Lambert," Simpson whined. "I told him to go to
the back door where he belongs."

"What an idea!" Lambert drawled. "Enter, Mr. Morton. My dear Mr. Morton,
what is the occasion? What can we do for you? I must beg you to excuse
my appearance. I had a trifling argument with my new hunter this
afternoon."

George grinned.

"Must be some horse."

None the less, he felt a bruise. It would have been balm to destroy
Lambert's mocking manner by a brusque attack even in this impressive
hall.

"Your father sent for me."

"Shall I put him out, sir?" Simpson quavered.

Lambert burst into a laugh.

"I shouldn't try it. We can't afford too many losses in one day. Go
away, Simpson, and don't argue with your betters. You might not be as
clever as I at explaining the visible results. I'll take care of Mr.
Morton."

Simpson was bewildered.

"Quite so, sir," he said, and vanished.

"My father," Lambert said, "is in the library--that first door. Wait.
I'll see if he's alone."

Painfully he limped to the door and opened it, while George waited,
endeavouring not to pull at his cap.

"Father," Lambert said, smoothly, "Mr. Morton is calling."

A deep voice, muffled by distance, vibrated in the hall.

"What are you talking about?"

Lambert bowed profoundly.

"Mr. Morton from the lodge."

George stepped close to him.

"Want me to thrash you again?"

Lambert faced him without panic.

"I don't admit that you could, but, my dear--George, I'm too fatigued
to-night to find out. Some day, if the occasion should arise, I hope I
may. I do sincerely."

He drew the door wide open, and stepped aside with a bow that held no
mockery. A white-haired, stately woman entered the hall, and, as she
passed, cast at George a glance curiously lacking in vitality. In her
George saw the spring of Sylvia's delicacy and beauty. Whatever Old
Planter might be this woman had something from the past, not to be
acquired, with which to endow her children. George resented it. It made
the future for him appear more difficult. Her voice was in keeping,
cultured and unaffected.

"Mr. Planter is alone, Morton. He would like to see you."

She disappeared in a room opposite. George took a deep breath.

"On that threshold," Lambert said, kindly, "I've often felt the same
way, though I've never deserved it as you do."

George plunged through and closed the door.

The room was vaster than the hall, and darker, impressing him confusedly
with endless, filled book-shelves; with sculpture; with a difficult maze
of furniture. The only light issued from a lamp on a huge and littered
table at the opposite end.

At first George glanced vainly about, seeking the famous man.

"Step over here, Morton."

There was no denying that voice. It came from a deep chair whose back
was turned to the light. It sent to George's heart his first touch of
fear. He walked carefully across the rugs and around the table until he
faced the figure in the chair. He wanted to get rid of his cap. He
couldn't resist the temptation to pull at it; and only grooms and stable
boys tortured caps.

The portly figure in evening clothes was not calculated to put a culprit
at ease. Old Planter sat very straight. The carefully trimmed white side
whiskers, the white hair, the bushy brows above inflamed eyes, composed
a portrait suggestive of a power relentless and not to be trifled with.
George had boasted he was as good as any one. He knew he wasn't as good
as Old Planter; their disparity of attainment was too easily palpable.
No matter whether Old Planter's success was worthy, he had gone out
into the world and done things. He had manipulated railroads. He had
piled up millions whose number he couldn't be sure of himself. He had
built this house and all it stood for. What one man had done another
could. George stopped pulling at his cap. He threw it on the table as
into a ring. His momentary fear died.

"You sent for me, sir."

The mark of respect flowed naturally. This old fellow was entitled to
it, from him or any one else.

The bass voice had a dynamic quality.

"I did. This afternoon you grossly and inexcusably insulted my daughter.
It will be necessary to speak of her to you just once more. That's why I
told your father to send you. If I were younger it would give me
pleasure to break every bone in your body."

The red lips opened and shut with the precision of a steel trap. They
softened now in a species of smile.

"I see, Morton, you had a little argument with a horse this afternoon."

George managed to smile back.

"Nothing to speak of, sir."

"I wish it had been. I take a pleasure in punishing you. It isn't
biblical, but it's human. I'm only sorry I can't devise a punishment to
fit the crime."

"It was no crime," George said bravely, "no insult."

"Keep your mouth shut. Unfortunately I can't do much more than run you
away from here, for I don't care to evict your parents from their home
for your folly; and they do not support you. Mr. Evans will pay you off
in the morning with a month's extra wages."

"I won't take a cent I haven't earned," George said.

Old Planter studied him with more curiosity.

"You're a queer livery stable boy."

"I'm banking on that," George said, willing the other should make what
he would of it.

"It's there if you wish it," Old Planter went on. "I sent for you so
that I could tell you myself that you will be away from Oakmont and
from the neighbourhood by noon to-morrow. And remember your home is now
a portion of Oakmont. You will never come near us again. You will forget
what happened this afternoon."

He stood up, his face reddening. George wanted to tell him that Sylvia
herself had said he shouldn't forget.

"If, Morton," the old man went on with a biting earnestness, "once
you're away from Oakmont, you ever bother Miss Sylvia again, or make any
attempt to see her, I'll dispossess your parents, and I'll drive you out
of any job you get. I'll keep after you until you'll understand what
you're defying. This isn't an idle threat. I have the power."

The father completely conquered him. He clenched his knotted fists.

"I'd destroy a regiment of creatures like you to spare my little girl
one of the tears you caused her this afternoon."

"After all," George said, defensively, "I'm a human being."

Old Planter shook his head.

"If your father hadn't failed you'd have spent your life in a livery
stable. It takes education, money, breeding to make a human being."

George nodded. He wouldn't need to plan much for himself, after all.
Sylvia's father was doing it for him.

"I've heard some pretty hard words to-day, sir," he said. "It's waked me
up. Can't a man get those things for himself?"

He fancied reminiscence in Old Planter's eyes.

"The right kind can. Get out of here now, Morton, and don't let me see
you or hear of you again."

George stepped between him and the table to pick up his cap. His nerves
tightened. Close to his cap lay an unmounted photograph, not very large,
of Sylvia. What a companion piece for the broken crop! What an ornament
for an altar dedicated to ambition, to anger, and to love! He would take
it under her father's nose, following her father's threats.

He slipped his cap over the photograph, and picked up both, the precious
likeness hidden by the cheap cloth.

"Good-night, sir."

He thought Old Planter started at the ring in his voice. He walked
swiftly from the room. Let Old Planter look out for himself. What did
all those threats amount to? Perhaps he could steal Sylvia as easily
from under her terrible parent's nose.


VI

Lambert, hands in pockets, stopped him in the hall.

"Packed off, as you deserve, but you'll need money."

"Thanks," George said. "I don't want any I don't earn."

"If father should kick me out," Lambert drawled, "I'd be inclined to
take what I could get."

"I'd rather steal," George said.

Lambert smiled whimsically.

"A word of advice. Stealing's dangerous unless you take enough."

George indicated the library door. He tried to imitate Lambert's manner.

"Then I suppose it's genius."

"What are you getting at?"

"I mean," George said, "you people may drive me to stealing, but it'll
be the kind you get patted on the back for."

"Sounds like Wall Street," Lambert smiled.

George wanted to put himself on record in this house.

"I'm going to make money, and don't you forget it."

Lambert's smile widened.

"Then good luck, and a good job--George."

George crushed his helpless irritation, turned, and walked out the front
door; more disappointed than he would have thought possible, because he
had failed to see Sylvia.

Reluctantly he returned to the nearly silent discomfort of his parents.
He tried to satisfy their curiosity.

"Nothing but threats. I'm to be driven to crime if I'm ever heard of
after I leave Oakmont in the morning."

"He might have made it worse," his father grunted.

The conversation died for lack of an interpreter.

His father made a pretence of reading a newspaper. His mother examined
her swollen hands. Her eyes suggested the nearness of tears. George got
up.

"I suppose I'd better be getting ready."

As he stooped to kiss her his mother slipped an arm around his neck.

"Mother's little boy."

George steadied his voice.

"Good-night, Dad."

His father filled his pipe reflectively.

"Good-night, George."

No word of sympathy; no sympathy at all, beyond a fugitive,
half-frightened hint from his mother, because he had run boldly against
a fashion of thinking; little more, really.

He softly closed the door of his room, the last time he would ever do
that! He sat on the edge of the bed. He took Sylvia's photograph from
his pocket and studied it with a deliberate lack of sentiment. He
fancied her desirable lips framing epithets of angry contempt and those
other words to which he had given his own significance.

"You'll not forget."

He looked so long, repeating it in his mind so often, that at last his
eyes blurred, and the pictured lips seemed, indeed, to curve and
straighten.

"You'll not forget."

He tapped the photograph with his forefinger.

"You're going to help me remember," he muttered. "I'll not forget."


VII

He placed the photograph and the broken crop at the bottom of his
oilcloth suitcase. The rest of his packing was simple; he had so little
that was actually his own. There were a few books on a shelf, relics of
his erratic attendance at the neighbouring high school--he regretted now
that his ambition there had been physical rather that mental. Even in
the development of his muscles, however, his brain had grown a good
deal, for he was bright enough. If he made himself work, drawing on
what money he had, he might get ready for college by fall. He had
always envied the boys, who had drifted annually from the high school to
the remote and exhilarating grandeur of a university.

What had Old Planter's sequence been? Education, money, breeding. Of
course. And he guessed that the three necessities might, to an extent,
walk hand in hand. The acquisition of an education would mean personal
contacts, helpful financially, projecting, perhaps, that culture that he
felt was as essential as the rest. Certainly the starting place for him
was a big university where a man, once in, could work his way through.
Lambert went to Yale. Harvard sprang into his mind, but there was the
question of railroad fare and lost time. He'd better try his luck at
Princeton which wasn't far and which had, he'd heard, a welcome for boys
working their way through college.

He examined his bank book. Fortunately, since he had lived with his
parents, he had had little opportunity or need for spending. The balance
showed nearly five hundred dollars, and he would receive fifty more in
the morning. If he could find someone to bolster up his insufficient
schooling for a part of that amount he'd make a go of it; he'd be fairly
on his course.

He went to bed, but he slept restlessly. He wanted to be away from
Oakmont and at work. Through his clouded mind persisted his desire for a
parting glimpse of Sylvia. If he slept at all it was to the discordant
memory of her anger.

The sun smiled into his room, summoning him to get up and go forth.

His father was not there. As if to emphasize the occasion, his mother
deserted her washtub, served his breakfast herself, stood about in
helpless attitudes.

"George," she whispered, toward the close of the desolate meal, "try to
get a job near here. Of course you could never come home, but we could
go to see you."

"Father," he said, "is kicking me out as much as Old Planter is, and you
back him up."

She clasped her hands.

"I've got to. And you can't blame your father. He has to look after
himself and me."

"It makes no difference. I'm not going to take a job near by," he said.

"Where are you going?" she asked, sharply.

He stared at her for a moment, profoundly sorry for her and for himself.

"I'm going to get away from everything that would remind me I've ever
been treated like something less than human."

She gave a little cry.

"Then say good-bye, my son, before your father comes back."


VIII

His father returned and stood impatiently waiting. There was nothing to
hold George except that unlikely chance of a glimpse of Sylvia. He would
say good-bye here, go up to the offices for his money, and then walk
straight out of Oakmont. He stepped from the house, swinging his
suitcase, his overcoat across his arm.

"I'm off," he said, trying to make his voice cheery.

His father considered his cold pipe. He held out his hand.

"It's a bad start, but maybe you'll turn out all right after all."

George smiled his confidence.

"Well, let us hear from you," his father went on, "although as things
are I don't see how I could help you much."

"Don't worry," George said.

He walked to his mother, who had returned to her work. He kissed her
quickly, saying nothing, for he saw the tears falling from her cheeks to
the dirty water out of which linen emerged soft and immaculate. He
strode toward the main driveway.

"Good-bye," he called quickly.

The renewed racket at the tub pursued him until he had placed a screen
of foliage between himself and the little house. His last recollection
of home, indeed, was of swollen hands and swollen eyes, and of clean,
white tears dropping into offensive water.

He got his money and walked past the great house and down the driveway.
He would not see home again. At a turn near the gate he caught his
breath, his eyes widening. The vague chance had after all materialized.
Sylvia walked briskly along, accompanied by a vicious-looking bulldog on
a leash. Her head was high and her shoulders square, as she always
carried them. Her eyes sparkled. Then she saw George, and she paused,
her expression altering into an active distaste, her cheeks flushing
with tempestuous colour.

"I can't go back now," George thought.

She seemed to visualize all that protected her from him. He put his
cheap suitcase down.

"I'm glad I saw you," he said, deliberately. "I wanted to thank you for
having me fired, for waking me up."

She didn't answer. She stood quite motionless. The dog growled,
straining at his leash toward the man in the road.

"I've been told to get out and stay out," he went on, his temper lashed
by her immobility. "You know I meant what I said yesterday when I
thought you couldn't hear. I did. Every last word. And you might as well
understand now I'll make every word good."

He pointed to the gate.

"I'm going out there just so I can come back and prove to you that I
don't forget."

Her colour fled. She stooped swiftly, gracefully, and unleashed the
anxious bulldog.

"Get him!" she whispered, tensely.

Like a shot the dog sprang for George. He caught the animal in his arms
and submitted to its moist and eager caresses.

"It's a mistake," he pointed out, "to send a dog that loves the stables
after a stable boy."

He dropped the dog, picked up his suitcase, and started down the drive.
The dog followed him. He turned.

"Go back, Roland!"

Sylvia remained crouched. She cried out, her contralto voice crowded
with surprise and repulsion:

"Take him with you. I never want to see him again."

So, followed by the dog, George walked bravely out into the world
through the narrow gateway of her home.




PART II

PRINCETON


I

"Young man, you've two years' work to enter."

"Just when," George asked, "does college open?"

"If the world continues undisturbed, in about two months."

"Very well. Then I'll do two years' work in two months."

"You've only one pair of eyes, my boy; only one brain."

George couldn't afford to surrender. He had arrived in Princeton the
evening before, a few hours after leaving Oakmont. It had been like a
crossing between two planets. Breathlessly he had sought and found a
cheap room in a students' lodging house, and afterward, guided by the
moonlight, he had wandered, spellbound, about the campus.

Certainly this could not be George Morton, yesterday definitely divided
from what Old Planter had described as human beings. His exaltation
grew. For a long time he walked in an amicable companionship of broader
spaces and more arresting architecture than even Oakmont could boast;
and it occurred to him, if he should enter college, he would have as
much share in all this as the richest student; at Princeton he would
live in the Great House.

His mood altered as he returned to his small, scantily furnished room
whose very unloveliness outlined the difficulties that lay ahead.

He unpacked his suitcase and came upon Sylvia's photograph and her
broken riding crop. In the centre of the table, where he would work, he
placed the photograph with a piece of the crop on either side. Whenever
he was alone in the room those objects would be there, perpetual lashes
to ambition; whenever he went out he would lock them away.

How lovely and desirable she was! How hateful! How remote! Had ever a
man such a goal to strain for? He wanted only to start.

Immediately after breakfast the next morning he set forth. He had never
seen a town so curiously empty. There were no students, since it was the
long vacation, except a few backward men and doubtful candidates for
admission. He stared by daylight at the numerous buildings which were
more imposing now, more suggestive of learning, wealth, and breeding.
They seemed to say they had something for him if only he would fight
hard enough to receive it.

First of all, he had to find someone who knew the ropes. There must be
professors here, many men connected with this gigantic plant. On Nassau
Street he encountered a youth, a little younger than himself, who, with
a bored air, carried three books under his arm. George stopped him.

"I beg your pardon. Are you going here?"

The other looked him over as if suspecting a joke.

"Going where?" he asked, faintly.

George appraised the fine quality of the young man's clothing. He was
almost sorry he had spoken. The first thing he had to do was to overcome
a reluctance to speak to people who obviously already had much that he
was after.

"I mean," he explained, "are you going to this college?"

"The Lord," the young man answered, "and Squibs Bailly alone know. I'm
told I'm not very bright in the head."

George smiled.

"Then I guess you can help me out. I'm not either. I want to enter in
the fall, and I need a professor or something like that to teach me.
I'll pay."

The other nodded.

"You need a coach. Bailly's a good one. I'm going there now to be told
for two hours I'm an utter ass. Maybe I am, but what's the use rubbing
it in? I don't know that he's got any open time, but you might come
along and see."

George, his excitement increasing, walked beside his new acquaintance.

"What's your name?" the bored youth asked all at once.

"Morton. George Morton."

"I'm Godfrey Rogers. Lawrenceville. What prep are you?"

"What what?"

"I mean, what school you come from?"

George experienced a sharp discomfort, facing the first of his
unforeseen embarrassments. Evidently his simple will to crush the past
wouldn't be sufficient.

"I went to a public school off and on," he muttered.

Rogers' eyes widened. George had a feeling that the boy had receded. It
wasn't until later, when he had learned the customs of the place, that
he could give that alteration its logical value. It made no difference.
He had a guide. Straightway he would find a man who could help him get
in; but he noticed that Rogers abandoned personalities, chatting only of
the difficulties of entrance papers, and the apparent mad desire of
certain professors to keep good men from matriculating.

They came to a small frame house on Dickinson Street. Rogers left George
in the hall while he entered the study. The door did not quite close,
and phrases slipped out in Rogers' glib voice, and, more frequently, in
a shrill, querulous one.

"Don't know a thing about him. Just met him on the street looking for a
coach. No prep."

"Haven't the time. I've enough blockheads as it is. He'd better go to
Corse's school."

"You won't see him?"

"Oh, send him in," George heard Bailly say irritably. "You, Rogers,
would sacrifice me or the entire universe to spare your brain five
minutes' useful work. I'll find out what he knows, and pack him off to
Corse. Wait in the hall."

Rogers came out, shaking his head.

"Guess there's nothing doing, but he'll pump you."

George entered and closed the door. Behind a table desk lounged a long,
painfully thin figure. The head was nearly bald, but the face carried a
luxuriant, carelessly trimmed Van Dyke beard. Above it cheeks and
forehead were intricately wrinkled, and the tweed suit, apparently,
strove to put itself in harmony. It was difficult to guess how old
Squibs Bailly was; probably very ancient, yet in his eyes George caught
a flashing spirit of youth.

The room was forcefully out of key with its occupant. The desk,
extremely neat with papers, blotters, and pens, was arranged according
to a careful pattern. On books and shelves no speck of dust showed, and
so far the place was scholarly. Then George was a trifle surprised to
notice, next to a sepia print of the Parthenon, a photograph of a
football team. That, moreover, was the arrangement around the four
walls--classic ruins flanked by modern athletes. On a table in the
window, occupying what one might call the position of honour, stood a
large framed likeness of a young man in football togs.

Before George had really closed the door the high voice had opened its
attack.

"I haven't any more time for dunces."

"I'm not a dunce," George said, trying to hold his temper.

Bailly didn't go on right away. The youthful glance absorbed each detail
of George's face and build.

"Anyhow," he said after a moment, less querulously, "let's see what you
lack of the infantile requirements needful for entrance in an American
university."

He probed George's rapid acquaintance with mathematics, history,
English, and the classics. With modern languages there was none. Then
the verdict came. Two years' work.

"I've got to make my eyes and brain do," George said. "I've got to enter
college this fall or never. I tell you, Mr. Bailly, I am going to do it.
I know you can help me, if you will. I'll pay."

Bailly shook his head.

"Even if I had the time my charges are high."

George showed his whole hand.

"I have about five hundred dollars."

"For this condensed acquisition of a kindergarten knowledge,
or--or----"

"For everything. But only let me get in and I'll work my way through."

Again Bailly shook his head.

"You can't get in this fall, and it's not so simple to work your way
through."

"Then," George said, "you refuse to do anything for me?"

The youthful eyes squinted. George had an odd impression that they
sought beyond his body to learn just what manner of man he was. The
querulous voice possessed more life.

"How tall are you?"

"A little over six feet."

"What's your weight?"

George hesitated, unable to see how such questions could affect his
entering college. He decided it was better to answer.

"A hundred and eighty-five."

"Good build!" Bailly mused. "Wish I'd had a build like that. If your
mind is as well proportioned----Take your coat off. Roll up your
sleeves."

"What for?" George asked.

Bailly arose and circled the desk. George saw that the skeleton man
limped.

"Because I'd like to see if the atrophying of your brain has furnished
any compensations."

George grinned. The portrait in the window seemed friendly. He obeyed.

Bailly ran his hand over George's muscles. His young eyes widened.

"Ever play football?"

George shook his head doubtfully.

"Not what you would call really playing. Why? Would football help?"

"Provided one's the right stuff otherwise, would being a god help one
climb Olympus?" Bailly wanted to know.

He indicated the framed likeness in the window.

"That's Bill Gregory."

"Seems to me I've seen his name in the papers," George said.

Bailly stared.

"Without doubt, if you read the public prints at all. He exerted much
useful cunning and strength in the Harvard and Yale games last fall. He
was on everybody's All-American eleven. I got him into college and
man-handled him through. Hence this scanty hair, these premature
furrows; for although he had plenty of good common-sense, and was one of
the finest boys I've ever known, he didn't possess, speaking relatively,
when it came to iron-bound text-books, the brains of a dinosaur; but he
had the brute force of one."

"Why did you do it?" George asked. "Because he was rich?"

"Young man," Bailly answered, "I am a product of this seat of learning.
With all its faults--and you may learn their number for yourself some
day--its success is pleasing to me, particularly at football. I am very
fond of football, perhaps because it approximates in our puling, modern
fashion, the classic public games of ruddier days. In other words, I was
actuated by a formless emotion called Princeton spirit. Don't ask me
what that is. I don't know. One receives it according to one's concept.
But when I saw in Bill something finer and more determined than most men
possess, I made up my mind Princeton was going to be proud of him, on
the campus, on the football field, and afterward out in the world."

The hollow, wrinkled face flushed.

"When Bill made a run I could think of it as my run. When he made a
touchdown I could say, 'there's one score that wouldn't have been made
if I hadn't booted Bill into college, and kept him from flunking out by
sheer brute mentality!' Pardon me, Mr. Morton. I love the silly game."

George smiled, sensing his way, if only he could make this fellow feel
he would be the right kind of Princeton man!

"I was going to say," he offered, "that while I had never had a chance
to play on a regular team I used to mix it up at school, but I was
stronger than most of the boys. There were one or two accidents. They
thought I'd better quit."

Bailly laughed.

"That's the kind of material we want. You do look as if you could bruise
a blue or a crimson jersey. Know where the field house is? Ask anybody.
Do no harm for the trainer to look you over. Be there at three o'clock."

"But my work? Will you help me?"

"Give me," Bailly pled, "until afternoon to decide if I'll take another
ten years from my life. That's all. Send that fellow Rogers in. Be at
the field house at three o'clock."

And as George passed out he heard him reviling the candidate.

"Don't see why you come to college. No chance to make the team or a Phi
Beta Kappa. One ought to be a requisite."

The shrill voice went lower. George barely caught the words certainly
not intended for him.

"You know I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that fellow you brought me,
if he had a chance, might do both."


II


George, since he had nothing else to do, walked home. Bailly could get
him in if he would. Did it really depend in part on the inspection he
would have to undergo that afternoon? It was hard there was nothing he
could do to prepare himself. He went to the yard, to which the landlady
had condemned Sylvia's bulldog, and, to kill time, played with the
friendly animal until luncheon. Afterward he sat in his room before
Sylvia's portrait impressing on himself the necessity of strength for
the coming ordeal.

His landlady directed him glibly enough to the field house. As he
crossed the practice gridiron, not yet chalked out, he saw Bailly on the
verandah; and, appearing very small and sturdy beside him, a
gray-haired, pleasant-faced man whose small eyes were relentless.

"This is the prospect, Green," George heard Bailly say.

The trainer studied George for some time before he nodded his head.

"A build to hurt and not get hurt," he said at last; "but, Mr. Bailly,
it's hard to supply experience. Boys come here who have played all their
lives, and they know less than nothing. Bone seems to grow naturally in
the football cranium."

He shifted back to George.

"How fast are you?"

"I've never timed myself, but I'm hard to catch."

"Get out there," the trainer directed.

"In those clothes?" Bailly asked.

"Why not? The ground's dry. A man wouldn't run any faster with moleskins
and cleats. Now you run as far as the end of that stand. Halt there for
a minute, then turn and come back."

He drew out a stop watch.

"All set? Then--git!"

George streaked down the field.

"It's an even hundred yards," the trainer explained to Bailly.

As George paused at the end of the stand the trainer snapped his watch,
whistling.

"There are lots with running shoes and drawers wouldn't do any better.
Let's have him back."

He waved his arm. George tore up and leant against the railing,
breathing hard, but not uncomfortably.

"You were a full second slower coming back," the trainer said with a
twinkle.

"I'm sorry," George cried. "Let me try it again."

Green shook his head.

"I'd rather see you make a tackle, but I've no one to spare."

He grinned invitation at Bailly.

"My spirit, Green," the tutor said, "is less fragile than my corpus, but
it has some common-sense. I prefer others should perish at the hands of
my discoveries."

"You've scrubbed around," the trainer said, appraising George's long,
muscular legs. "Ever kick a football?"

"A little."

Green entered the field house, reappearing after a moment with a
football tucked under his arm.

"Do you mind stepping down the field, Mr. Bailly, to catch what he
punts? I wouldn't go too far."

Bailly nodded and walked a short distance away. The trainer gave George
the football and told him to kick it to Bailly. George stepped on the
grass and swung his leg. If the ball had travelled horizontally as far
as it did toward heaven it would have been a good kick. For half an hour
the trainer coached interestedly, teaching George the fundamentals of
kicking form. Some of the later punts, indeed, boomed down the field for
considerable distances, but in George's mind the high light of that
unexpected experience remained the lanky, awkward figure in wrinkled
tweeds, limping about the field, sometimes catching the ball, sometimes
looking hurt when it bounded from his grasp, sometimes missing it
altogether, and never once losing the flashing pleasure from his eyes or
the excitement out of his furrowed face.

"Enough," the trainer said at last.

George heard him confide to the puffing tutor:

"Possibilities. Heaven knows we'll need them a year from this fall,
especially in the kicking line. I believe this fellow can be taught."

Bailly, his hands shaking from his recent exercise, lighted a pipe. He
assumed a martyr's air. His voice sounded as though someone had done him
an irreparable wrong.

"Then I'll have to try, but it's hard on me, Green, you'll admit."

George hid his excitement. He knew he had passed his first examination.
He was sure he would enter college. Already he felt the confidence most
men placed in Squibs Bailly.

"Wouldn't you have taken him on anyway, Mr. Bailly?" the trainer
laughed. "Anyway, a lot of my players are first-group men. I depend on
you to turn him over in the fall for the Freshman eleven. Going to
town?"

"Come on, Morton," Bailly said, remorsefully.

Side by side the three walked through to Nassau Street and past the
campus. George said nothing, drinking in the scarcely comprehensible
talk of the others about team prospects and the appalling number of
powerful and nimble young men who would graduate the following June.

Near University Place he noticed Rogers loafing in front of a restaurant
with several other youths who wore black caps. He wondered why Rogers
started and stared at him, then turned, speaking quickly to the others.

Green went down University Place. George paced on with Bailly. In front
of the Nassau Club the tutor paused.

"I'm going in here," he said, "but you can come to my house at
eight-thirty. We'll work until ten-thirty. We'll do that every night
until your brain wrinkles a trifle. You may not have been taught that
twenty-four hours are allotted to each day. Eight for sleep. Two with
me. Two for meals. Two at the field. Two for a run in the country. That
leaves eight for study, and you'll need every minute of them. I'll give
you your schedule to-night. If you break it once I'll drop you, for
you've got to have a brain beyond the ordinary to make it wrinkle
enough."

"Thanks, Mr. Bailly. If you don't mind, what will it cost?"

Bailly considered.

"I'll have to charge you," he said at last, "twenty-five dollars, but I
can lend you most of the books."

George understood, but his pride was not hurt.

"I'll pay you in other ways."

Bailly looked at him, his emaciated face smiling all over.

"I think you will," he said with a little nod. "All right. At
eight-thirty."

He limped along the narrow cement walk and entered the club. George
started back. The group, he noticed, still loitered in front of the
restaurant. Rogers detached himself and strolled across. He was no
longer suspicious.

"You been down at the field with Mr. Green?"

"Yes."

"What for?"

"Running a little, kicking a football around."

"Trust Bailly to guess you played. What did Green say?"

"If I get in," George, answered simply, "I think he'll give me a show."

"I guess so," Rogers said, thoughtfully, "or he wouldn't be wasting his
time on you now. Come on over and meet these would-be Freshmen. We'll
all be in the same class unless we get brain-fever. Mostly
Lawrenceville."

George crossed and submitted to elaborate introductions and warm
greetings.

"Green's grooming him already for the Freshman eleven," Rogers
explained.

George accepted the open admiration cautiously, not forgetting what he
had been yesterday, what Sylvia had said. Why was Rogers so friendly all
at once?

"What prep?" "Where'd you play?" "Line or backfield?"

The rapidity of the questions lessened his discomfort. How was he to
avoid such moments? He must make his future exceptionally full so that
it might submerge the past of which he couldn't speak without
embarrassment. In this instance Rogers helped him out.

"Morton's bummed around. Never went to any school for long."

George pondered this kind act and its fashion as he excused himself and
walked on to his lodging. There was actually something to hide, and
Rogers admitted it, and was willing to lend a cloak. He could guess why.
Because Green was bothering with him, had condescended to be seen on the
street with him. George's vision broadened.

He locked himself in his room and sat before his souvenirs. Sylvia's
provocative features seemed clearer. For a long time he stared hungrily.
He had an absurd impression that he had already advanced toward her.
Perhaps he had in view of what had happened that afternoon.

His determination as well as his strength had clearly attracted Bailly;
yet that strength, its possible application to football, had practically
assured him he would enter college, had made an ally of the careful
Rogers, had aroused the admiration of such sub-Freshmen as were in town.
It became clear that if he should be successful at football he would
achieve a position of prominence from which he could choose friends
useful here and even in the vital future after college.

His planning grew more practical. If football, a game of which he knew
almost nothing, could do that, what might he not draw from one he
thoroughly knew--anything concerning horses, for instance, hunting,
polo? The men interested in horses would be the rich, the best--he
choked a trifle over the qualification--the financial and social leaders
of the class. He would have that card up his sleeve. He would play it
when it would impress most. Skill at games, he hazarded, would make it
easier than he had thought to work his way through.

Whatever distaste such cold calculation brought he destroyed by staring
at Sylvia's remote beauty. If he was to reach such a goal he would have
to use every possible short cut, no matter how unlovely.

He found that evening a radical alteration in Squibs Bailly's study. The
blotter was spattered with ink. Papers littered the desk and drifted
about the floor. Everything within reach of the tutor's hands was
disarranged and disreputably untidy. Bailly appeared incomparably more
comfortable.

The course opened with a small lecture, delivered while the attenuated
man limped up and down the cluttered room.

"Don't fancy," he began, "that you have found in football a key to the
scholastic labyrinth."

His wrinkled face assumed a violent disapproval. His youthful eyes
flashed resentfully.

"Mr. Morton, if I suffered the divine Delphic frenzy and went to the
Dean and assured him you were destined to be one of our very best
undergraduates and at the same time would make fifteen touchdowns
against Yale, and roughly an equal number against Harvard, do you know
what he would reply?"

George gathered that an answer wasn't necessary.

"You might think," the tutor resumed, limping faster than ever, "that he
would run his fingers through his hair, if he had sufficient; would
figuratively flame with pleasure; would say: 'Miraculous, Mr. Bailly.
You are a great benefactor. We must get this extraordinary youth in the
university even if he can't parse "the cat caught the rat."'"

Bailly paused. He clashed his hands together.

"Now I'll tell you what he'd actually reply. 'Interesting if true, Mr.
Bailly. But what are his scholastic attainments? Can he solve a
quadratic equation in his head? Has he committed to memory my favourite
passages of the "Iliad" of Homer and the "Aeneid" of Virgil? Can he name
the architect of the Parthenon or the sculptor of the Aegean pediments?
No? Horrible! Then off with his head!'"

Bailly draped himself across his chair.

"Therefore it behooves us to get to work."


III

That was the first of sixty-odd toilsome, torturing evenings, for Bailly
failed to honour the Sabbath; and, after that first lecture, drab
business alone coloured those hours. The multiplicity of subjects was
confusing; but, although Bailly seldom told him so, George progressed
rapidly, and Bailly knew just where to stress for the examinations.

If it had ended there it would have been bad enough. When he studied the
schedule Bailly gave him that first night he had a despairing feeling
that either he or it must break down. Everything was accounted for even
to the food he was to eat. That last, in fact, created a little
difficulty with the landlady, who seemed to have no manner of
appreciation of the world-moving importance of football. Rogers wanted
to help out there, too. He had found George's lodging. It was when
Green's interest was popular knowledge, when from the Nassau Club had
slipped the belief that Squibs Bailly had turned his eyes on another
star. George made it dispassionately clear to Rogers that Bailly had not
allowed in his schedule for calls. Rogers was visibly disappointed.

"Where do you eat, then?"

"Here--with Mrs. Michin."

"Now look, Morton. That's no way. Half a dozen of us are eating at Joe's
restaurant. They're the best of the sub-Freshmen that are here. Come
along with us."

The manner of the invitation didn't make George at all reluctant to tell
the truth.

"I can't afford to be eating around in restaurants."

"That needn't figure," Rogers said, quickly. "Green's probably only
letting you eat certain things. I'll guarantee Joe'll take you on for
just what you're paying Mrs. Michin."

George thought rapidly. He could see through Rogers now. The boy wanted,
even as he did, to run with the best, but for a vastly different cause.
That was why his manner had altered that first morning when he had sized
George up as the unfinished product of a public school, why it had
altered again when he had sensed in him a football star. George's heart
warmed, but not to Rogers. Because he rioted around for a period each
afternoon in an odorous football suit he was already, in the careful
Rogers' eyes, one of the most prominent of the students in town. For the
same reason he was in a position to wait and make sure that Rogers
himself was the useful sort. George possessed no standard by which to
judge, and it would be a mistake to knot ropes that he might want to
break later; nor did he care for that sort of charity, no matter how
well disguised, so he shook his head.

"Green and Squibs wouldn't put up with it."

He wheedled his landlady, instead, into a better humour, paying her
reluctantly a little more.

The problem of expenses was still troublesome, but it became evident
that there, too, Bailly would be a useful guide.

"I have actually bearded the dean about you," he said one evening.
"There are a few scholarships not yet disposed of. If I can prove to him
that you live by syntax alone you may get one. As for the rest, there's
the commons. Impecunious students profitably wait on table there."

George's flush was not pretty.

"I'll not be a servant," he snapped.

"It's no disgrace," Bailly said, mildly.

"It is--for me."

He didn't like Bailly's long, slightly pained scrutiny. There was no use
keeping things from him anyway.

"I can trust you, Mr. Bailly," he said, quickly, and in a very low
voice, as if the walls might hear: "I know you won't give me away. I--I
was too much like a servant until the day I came to Princeton. I've
sworn I'd never be again. I can't touch that job. I tell you I'd rather
starve."

"To do so," Bailly remarked, drily, "would be a senseless suicide.
You'll appreciate some day, young man, that the world lives by service."

George wondered why he glanced at the untidy table with a smile
twitching at the corners of his mouth.

"I'm also sorry to learn your ambition is not altogether unselfish, or
altogether worthy."

George longed to make Bailly understand.

"It was forced on me," he said. "I worked in my father's livery business
until he failed. Then I had to go to a rich man's stable. I was treated
like dirt. Nobody would have anything to do with me. They won't here,
probably, if they find out."

"Never mind," Bailly sighed. "We will seek other means. Let us get on
with our primers."

Once or twice, when some knotty problem took George to the house during
the early morning, he found the spic-and-span neatness he had observed
at his first visit. In Bailly's service clearly someone laboured with a
love of labour, without shame or discouragement.

One evening in August the maid who customarily opened the door was
replaced by a short, plump-looking woman well over thirty. She greeted
George with kindly eyes.

"I daresay you're Mr. Morton. I've heard a great deal about you."

George had never seen a face more unaffected, more friendly, more
competent. His voice was respectful.

"Yes, ma'am."

"And I am Mrs. Bailly. We expect much of you."

There rushed over George a feeling that, his own ambition aside, he had
to give them a great deal. No wonder Squibs felt as he did if his ideas
of service had emerged from such a source.

That portion of his crowded schedule George grew eventually to like. It
brought him either unrestrained scolding or else a tempered praise; and
he enjoyed his cross-country runs. Sylvia's bulldog usually accompanied
him, unleashed, for he could control the animal. With surprised eyes he
saw estates as extravagant as Oakmont, and frequently in better taste.
Little by little he picked up the names of the families that owned them.
He told himself that some day he would enter those places as a guest,
bowed to by such servants as he had been. It was possible, he promised
himself bravely, if only he could win a Yale or a Harvard game.

He enjoyed, too, the hours he spent at the field. He could measure his
progress there as well as in Bailly's study. Green was slow with either
praise or blame, but sometimes Rogers and his clan would come down, and,
sitting in the otherwise empty stands, would audibly marvel at the
graceful trajectory of his punts. He soiled himself daily at the
tackling dummy. He sprawled after an elusive ball, falling on it or
picking it up on the run. Meantime, he had absorbed the elements of the
rules. He found them rather more complicated than the classics.

The head coach came from the city one day. Like Green, he said nothing
in praise or blame, merely criticising pleasantly; but George felt that
he was impressed. The great man even tossed the ball about with him for
a while, teaching him to throw at a definite mark. After that Rogers and
his cronies wanted to be more in evidence than ever, but George had no
time for them, or for anything outside his work.

His will to survive the crushing grind never really faltered, but he
resented its necessity, sometimes wistfully, sometimes with turbulence.
He despised himself for regretting certain pleasanter phases of his
serfdom at Oakmont. The hot, stuffy room on the top floor of the frame
house; the difficult books; the papers streaked with intricate and
reluctant figures, contrived frequently to swing his mind to pastoral
corners of the Planter estate. He might have held title to them, they
had been so much his own. He had used them during his free time for the
reading of novels, and latterly, he remembered, for formless dreams of
Sylvia's beauty. At least his mind had not been put to the torture
there. He had had time to listen to a bird's song, to ingratiate himself
with a venturesome squirrel, to run his hands through the long grass, to
lie half asleep, brain quite empty save for a temporal content.

Now, running or walking in the country, he found no time for the happier
aspects of woods or fields. He had to drive himself physically in order
that his mind could respond to Bailly's urgencies. And sometimes, as has
been suggested, his revolt was more violent. He paced his room angrily.
Why did he do it? Why did he submit? Eventually his eyes would turn to
her photograph, and he would go back to his table.

He was grateful for the chance that had let him pick up that picture.
Without its constant supervision he might not have been able to keep up
the struggle. During the worst moments, when some solution mocked him,
he would stare at the likeness while his brain fought, while, with a
sort of self-hypnosis induced by that pictured face, he willed himself
to keep on.

One night, when he had suffered over an elusive equation beyond his
scheduled bedtime, he found his eyes, as he stared at the picture,
blurring strangely; then the thing was done, the answer proved; but
after what an effort! Why did his eyes blur? Because of the intensity of
some emotion whose significance he failed all at once to grasp. He
continued to stare at Sylvia's beauty, informed even here with a sincere
intolerance; at those lips which had released the contempt that had
delivered him to this other slavery. Abruptly the emotion, that had
seemed to leap upon him from the books and the complicated figures,
defined itself with stark, unavoidable brutality. He reached out and
with both hands grasped the photograph. He wanted to snatch his hands
apart, ripping the paper, destroying the tranquil, arrogant features. He
replaced the picture, leant back, and continued hypnotically to study
it. His hands grasped the table's edge while the blurring of his eyes
increased. He spoke aloud in a clear and sullen voice:

"I hate you," he said. "With all my heart and soul and body I hate you."


IV

About this time one partial break in the schedule came like a strong
tonic. Bailly at the close of an evening's session spoke, George
fancied, with a little embarrassment.

"My wife wants to speak to you before you go."

He raised his voice.

"Martha! The battle's over for to-night."

She came quietly in and perched herself on the arm of a chair.

"I'm having a few people for dinner to-morrow," she explained. "There's
one young girl, so I want a young man. Won't you help me out?"

George's elation was shot with doubt of an unexplored territory. This
promised an advance if he could find the way. He glanced inquiringly at
Bailly.

"Women," the tutor said, "lack a sense of values. I shall be chained
anyway to my wife's ill-conceived hospitality, so you might as well
come. But we'll dine early so we won't destroy an entire evening."

"Then at seven-thirty, Mr. Morton," Mrs. Bailly said.

"Thank you," George answered. "I shall be very happy to come."

As a matter of fact, he was there before seven-thirty, over-anxious to
be socially adequate. He had worried a good deal about the invitation.
Could it be traced to his confession to Bailly? Was it, in any sense, a
test? At least it bristled with perplexities. His ordinary suit of
clothing, even after an extended pressing and brushing, was, he felt,
out of place. It warned him that of the ritual of a mixed dinner he was
blankly ignorant. He established two cardinal principles. He would watch
and imitate the others. He wouldn't open his mouth unless he had to.

Bailly, with tact, wore the disgraceful tweeds, but there were two other
men, a professor and a resident, George gathered in the rapidity of the
introduction which slurred names. These wore evening clothes. Of the two
elderly women who accompanied them one was quite dazzling, displaying
much jewellery, and projecting an air truly imperial. Side by side with
her Mrs. Bailly appeared more than ever a priestess of service; yet to
George her serene self-satisfaction seemed ornament enough.

Where, George wondered, was the girl for whom he had been asked?

Mrs. Bailly drew him from these multiple introductions. He turned and
saw the girl standing in the doorway, a dazzling portrait in a dingy
frame. As he faced her George was aware of a tightening of all his
defences. Her clothing, her attitude, proclaimed her as of Sylvia's
sort. He ventured to raise his eyes to her face. It was there, too, the
habit of the beautiful, the obvious unfamiliarity with life's grayer
tones. Yet she did not resemble Sylvia. Her skin was nearly white. Her
hair glinted with gold; but she, too, was lovely. George asked himself
if she would have lifted the crop, if all these fortunates reacted to a
precise and depressing formula. Somehow he couldn't imagine this girl
striking to hurt.

Mrs. Bailly presented him. Her name was Alston, Betty

Alston, it developed during the succeeding general conversation. He
fixed the stouter of the men in evening clothes as her father and the
imperial woman as her mother. He understood then that they were, indeed,
of Sylvia's sort, for during his cross-country work he had frequently
passed their home, an immense Tudor house in the midst of pleasant
acres.

It was because of the girl that the pitfalls of dinner were bridged. In
the technique of accepting Mrs. Bailly's excellent courses he was always
a trifle behind her. She made conversation, moreover, surprisingly easy.
After the first few moments, during which no one troubled to probe his
past, the older people left them to themselves. She didn't ask what his
prep was, or where he lived, or any other thing to make him stammer.

"You look like a football player," she said, frankly.

They talked of his work. He said he had admired her home during his
runs. She responded naturally:

"When we are really back you must come and see it more intimately."

The invitation to enter the gates!

He fell silent. Would it be fair to go without giving her an opportunity
to treat him as Sylvia had done? Why should she inspire such a question?
Hadn't he willed his past to oblivion? Hadn't he determined to take
every short cut? Of course he would go, as George Morton, undergraduate,
football player, magician with horses. The rest was none of her
business.

They were in Princeton, she explained, only for a few days from time to
time, but would be definitely back when college opened. She, too, was
going to be introduced to society that winter. He wanted to ask her how
it was done. He pictured a vast apartment, dense with unpleasant people,
and a man who cried out with a brazen voice: "Ladies and gentlemen! This
is Miss Sylvia Planter. This is Miss Betty Alston." Quite like an
auction.

"It must be wonderful to play football," she was saying. "I should have
preferred to be a man. What can a girl do? Bad tennis, rotten golf,
something with horses."

He smiled. He could impress Betty Alston, but there was no point in
that, because she was a girl, and he could think of only one girl.

Yet he carried home an impression of unexpected interest and kindness.
Her proximity, the rustling of her gown, the barely detectable perfume
from her tawny hair, furnished souvenirs intangible but very warm in his
memory. They made the portrait and the broken crop seem lifeless and
unimpressive.

He forced himself to stare at Sylvia's likeness until the old hypnotic
sense returned.


V

He saw Betty Alston once more before college opened, unexpectedly,
briefly, and disturbingly; but with all that he carried again to his
lodging an impression of a distracting contact.

He was out for a morning run, wearing some ancient flannels Bailly had
loaned him, and a sweater, for autumn's first exhilaration sharpened the
air. Sylvia's bulldog barked joyously about him as he trotted through a
lane not far from the Alston place. He often went that way, perhaps
because its gates were already half open. As he turned the corner of a
hedge he came face to face with Betty. In a short skirt and knitted
jacket she was even more striking than she had been at the Bailly's. The
unexpected encounter had brought colour to her rather pale face. The
bulldog sprang for her. George halted him with a sharp command.

"I am not afraid of him," she laughed. "Come here, savage beast."

The dog crawled to her and licked her fingers. George saw her examining
the animal curiously.

"I hope he didn't frighten you," he said, his cap in his hand.

She glanced up, and at her voice George straightened, and turned quickly
away so that she couldn't see the response to her amazing question. Was
it, he asked himself, traceable to Old Planter's threats. Were they
going to try to smash him at the start and keep him out of Princeton?

"Do you happen," Betty had said, frowning, "to know Sylvia Planter, or,
perhaps, her brother, Lambert?"

George didn't care to lie; nor was it, his instinct told him, safe to
lie to Betty. She knew the Planters, then. But how could Old Planter
drive him out except through his parents? He wasn't going to be driven
out. He turned back slowly. In Betty's face he read only a slight
bewilderment.

"That's a queer thing to ask," he managed.

"The dog," she said, caressing the ugly snout, "is the image of one
Sylvia Planter was very fond of. Sylvia and I were at school together
last year. I've just been visiting her the last few days. She said she
had given her dog away."

She drew the dog closer and read the name on the collar.

"Roland! What was the name of her dog?"

George relaxed.

"That dog," he said, harshly, "belongs to me."

She glanced at him, surprised, releasing the dog and standing up. It
wasn't Old Planter then, and his parents were probably safe enough; but
had Sylvia, he asked himself angrily, made a story for her guest out of
his unwary declaration and his abrupt vanishing from Oakmont? Did this
friendly creature know anything? If she did she would cease to be
amiable. His anger diminished as he saw the curiosity leave her face.

"An odd resemblance! Do you know, Mr. Morton, I rather think you're
bound to meet Lambert Planter anyway. I believe he's a very important
young man at Yale. You'll have to play football a little better than he
does. His sister and he are going to visit me for a few days before he
goes back to New Haven. Perhaps you'll see him then."

George resented the prospect. He got himself away.

"Squibs," he told her, "sees everything. If I loiter he finds out and
scolds."

He had an impression that she looked after him until he was out of
sight. Or was it the dog that still puzzled her? Something of her, at
least, accompanied him longer than that--her kindness, her tact in the
matter of the Planters. He would take very good care that he didn't meet
Lambert; the prospect of Sylvia's adjacence, however, filled him with a
disturbing excitement. He wanted to see her, but he felt it wouldn't be
safe to have her see him yet.

Her picture increased his excitement, filled him with a craving for her
physical presence. He desired to look at her, as he had looked at the
photograph, to see if he could tell himself under those conditions that
he hated her. Whether that was true or not, he was more determined than
ever to make his boasts good.


VI

The day of the immediate test approached and he found himself no longer
afraid of it. Even Bailly one early September evening abandoned
cynicism.

"You've every chance, Morton," he said, puffing at his pipe, "to enter
creditably. You may have a condition in French, but what of that? We'll
have it off by the divisionals. I'll admit you're far from a dunce.
During the next ten days we'll concentrate on the examination
idiosyncrasies of my revered colleagues."

The scholarship had, in fact, been won for George, but the necessary
work, removed from any suspicion of the servatorial, had not yet been
found. Bailly, although he plainly worried himself, told George not to
be impatient; then, just before the entrance examinations, the head
coach arrived and settled himself in Princeton. Self-assured young men
drifted to the field now every afternoon--"varsity men," the Rogers clan
whispered with awe. And there were last year's substitutes, and faithful
slaves of the scrub, over-anxious, pouring out to early practice,
grasping at one more chance. So far no Freshmen candidates had been
called, but the head coach was heard to whisper to Green:

"We'd better work this fellow Morton with the squad until the cubs
start. He'll stand a lot of practice. Give him all the football he'll
hold. He's outkicking his ends now. Jack him up without cutting down his
distance. I'd like to see him make a tackle. He looks good at the dummy,
but you never can tell. He may be an ear-puller."

The magic words slipped through the town. George caught arriving
Freshmen pointing him out. He overheard glowing prophecies.

"Green says he'll outkick Dewitt."

It didn't turn his head. To be the greatest player the game had ever
known wouldn't have turned his head, for that would have been only one
small step toward the summit from which Sylvia looked down on him with
contemptuous, inimical eyes.

The head coach one afternoon gave the ball to a young man of no
pronounced value, and instructed him to elude George if he could.

"You, Morton," the head coach instructed, "see that he doesn't get past
you. Remember what you've done to the dummy."

George nodded, realizing that this was a real test to be passed with a
hundred per cent. That man with the ball had the power and the desire
to make a miserable failure of him. For the moment he seemed more than a
man, deadly, to be conquered at any cost. Schooled by his
rough-and-tumble combats at school and in the stables, George kept his
glance on the other's eyes; knew, therefore, when he was going to
side-step, and in which direction; lunged at exactly the right moment;
clipped the runner about the knees; lifted him; brought him crashing to
the ground. The ball rolled to one side. George released his man,
sprawled, and gathered the ball in his arms. A great silence descended
on the field. Out of it, as George got up, slipped the uncertain voice
of his victim.

"Did anything break off, Green? That wasn't a tackle. It was a bad
accident. How could I tell he was a bull when he didn't wear horns?"

George helped the man to his feet.

"Hope I didn't hurt you."

"Oh, no. I'll be all right again in a couple of months."

He limped about his work, muttering:

"Maybe mother was right when she didn't want me to play this game."

The coach wasn't through. He gave the ball to George and signalled one
of the biggest of the varsity men.

"Let me see you get past that fellow, Morton."

George didn't get past, although, with the tackler's vise-like grip
about his legs, he struggled with knees and elbows, and kept his feet
until the coach called to let him go.

"I'm sorry," George began.

"Yes," Green said, severely, "you've got to learn to get past tacklers.
If you learn to do that consistently I'll guarantee you a place on the
team, provided Mr. Stringham's willing."

"I'm willing," the head coach said with apparent reluctance.

Everyone within hearing laughed, but George couldn't laugh, although he
knew it was expected.

"Mr. Stringham," he said, "I will learn to get past them unless they
come too thick."

The coach patted his shoulder. His voice was satisfied.

"Run along to the showers now."

There may have been something in the sequence of these events, for that
very night Squibs Bailly's face twitched with satisfaction.

"You have a share," he said, "in the agency of the laundry most
generally patronized by our young men. It will pay you enough unless you
long for automobiles and gaiety."

"No," George said, "but, Mr. Bailly, I need clothes. I can afford to buy
some now. Where shall I go? What shall I get?"

Bailly limped about thoughtfully. He named a tailor of the town. He
prescribed an outing suit and a dinner suit.

"Because," he said, "if you're asked about, you want to be able to go,
and a dinner suit will pass for a Freshman nearly anywhere."

"If," George asked himself defiantly as he walked home, "Squibs thinks
my ambition unworthy, why does he go out of his way to boost it? Anyway,
I'm going to do my best to make touchdowns for him and Mrs. Squibs. Is
that Princeton spirit, or Bailly spirit, or am I fooling myself, and am
I going to make touchdowns just for myself and Sylvia Planter?"


VII

The meeting he had desired above all things to avoid took place when he
was, for a moment, off his guard. He was on his way to Dickinson Hall
for his first examination. Perhaps that was why he was too absorbed to
notice the automobile drawn up at the curb just ahead, and facing him.
He had no warning. He nearly collided with Lambert Planter, who walked
out of a shop. George stopped, drew back, and thought of dodging behind
the procession of worried, sombrely clothed Freshmen; but there wasn't
time. Lambert's face showed bewilderment and recognition.

"Certainly it is Mr. Morton," he said in his old mocking fashion.

George glanced at the surprised features which, in a masculine fashion,
were reminiscent of Sylvia; and beyond he saw, in the rear seat of the
automobile, Sylvia herself, lovelier, more removed than ever. Betty
Alston sat at her side. Evidently neither had observed the encounter,
for they laughed and chatted, probably about the terror-stricken
Freshmen.

George swallowed hard.

"I heard you were going to be here. I wanted to keep out of your way."

"But why?" Lambert laughed. "You have a scholastic appearance. You never
mean----"

"I am taking my entrance examinations," George said. "I want to make
good here."

He looked straight into Lambert's eyes. His voice became incisive,
threatening.

"I will make good. Don't try giving me away. Don't you tell Miss Alston
where I came from----"

"Yeh. The big fellow! Morton! Stringham and Green say he's going to be a
wonder."

It drifted to them from the passing youths.

Lambert whistled. The mockery left his voice.

"Go as far as you can," he said.

And followed it with:

"Don't be a self-conscious ass."

He smiled whimsically.

"Glad to have run into you--George."

The driver had noticed Lambert. The automobile glided nearer.

"I--I've got to get away," George said, hastily. "I don't want your
sister to see me."

Lambert turned. His voice, in turn, was a trifle threatening.

"That's all nonsense. She's forgotten all about you; she wouldn't know
you from Adam."

George couldn't help staring. What a contrast the two young women
offered! He wanted to realize that he actually looked at Sylvia Planter,
Sylvia of the flesh, Sylvia who had expressed for him an endless
contempt. But he couldn't help seeing also the golden hair and the soft
colouring of Betty Alston.

Lambert sprang into the car. Sylvia and Betty both glanced at the man
he had left. George waited. What would happen now? Sylvia's colour did
not heighten. Her eyes did not falter. Betty smiled and waved her hand.
George took off his cap, still expectant. Sylvia's lifeless stare
continued until the car had rolled away. George sighed, relaxed, and
went on.

Had Lambert been right? He didn't want to believe that. It hurt too
much.

"She saw me," he muttered. "She stared, not as if she saw an unknown
man, but as if she wanted to make me think she saw nothing. She saw me."

But he couldn't be sure. It seemed to him then that he wanted more than
anything in the world to be sure.

And he had not taken advantage of his chance. Instead of looking at her
and fixing the stark fact of hatred in his mind, he had only thought
with an angry, craving desire:

"You are the loveliest thing in the world. The next time you'll know me.
By God, the next time I'll _make_ you know me."


VIII

In the examination hall George called upon his will to drive from his
mind the details of that encounter. Lambert might be dependable, but if
Sylvia had actually recognized him what might she not say to Betty
Alston? He didn't want to see the kindness vanish from Betty's eyes, nor
the friendliness from her manner. Lambert's assurance, moreover, that
Sylvia had forgotten him lingered irritatingly.

"I will not think of it," George told himself. "I will think of nothing
but this paper. I will pass it."

This ability to discipline his mind had increased steadily during his
hours before Sylvia's portrait. The simple command "I will," was a
necessity his brain met with a decreasing reluctance. For two hours now
it excluded everything except his work. At the end of that time he
signed his paper, sat back, and examined the anxious young men crowded
about him in the long room. From these he must sooner or later detach
the ones of value to himself. That first quick appraisal disclosed
little; they were clothed too much to a pattern, wearing black jerseys,
more often than not, black clothes, with black caps hanging from the
supports of their chairs. In their faces, however, were visible
differences that made him uneasy. Even from a uniform, then, men, to an
extent, projected discrepancies of birth, or training, or habit. He
sighed and turned in his paper.

At the foot of the stairs groups collected, discussing the ordeal
pessimistically. As he started to walk through, several spoke to George.

"How did _you_ hit it, Morton?"

Already he was well spotted. He paused and joined the apprehensive
chatter.

"It's a toss-up with me," Rogers admitted. "Don't tell me any answers.
If ignorance is bliss, I want to stay dumb."

He caught George's arm.

"Have you met Dicky Goodhue? Hello, Goodhue!"

Goodhue gave the impression of not having met Rogers to any extent. He
was a sturdy young man with handsome, finely formed features. George
looked at him closely, because this young man alone of the Freshmen he
had met remained unmoved by his fame.

"Would like you to meet Morton, Goodhue."

Goodhue glanced at George inquiringly, almost resentfully.

"George Morton," Rogers stumbled on, as if an apology were necessary.
"Stringham, you know, and Green----"

"Glad to meet you," Goodhue said, indifferently.

"Thanks," George acknowledged as indifferently, and turned away.

Goodhue, it came upon him with a new appreciation of difficulties, was
the proper sort. He watched him walk off with a well-dressed,
weak-looking youth, threading a careless course among his classmates.

"How long have you known this fellow Goodhue?" George asked as he
crossed the campus with Rogers.

"Oh, Goodhue?" Rogers said, uncomfortably. "I've seen him any number of
times. Ran into him last night."

"Good-looking man," George commented. "Where's he come from?"

"You don't know who Dicky Goodhue is!" Rogers cried. "I mean, you must
have heard of his father anyway, the old Richard. Real Estate for
generations. Money grows for them without their turning a hand. Dicky's
up at the best clubs in New York. Plays junior polo on Long Island."

George had heard enough.

"If I do as well with the other exams," he said, "I'm going to get in."

With Freshmen customs what they were, he was thinking, he could appear
as well dressed as the Goodhue crowd. He would take pains with that.

He passed Goodhue on his way to the examination hall that afternoon, and
Goodhue didn't remember him. The incident made George thoughtful. Was
football going to prove the all-powerful lever he had fancied? At any
rate, Rogers' value was at last established.

He reported that evening to Bailly:

"I think it's all right so far."

The tutor grinned.

"To-day's beyond recall, but to-morrow's the future, and it cradles,
among other dragons, French."

He pointed out passages in a number of books.

"Wrestle with those until midnight," he counselled, "and then go to
sleep. Day after to-morrow we'll hope you can apply your boot to a
football again."

Mrs. Bailly stopped him in the hall.

"How did it go?" she asked, eagerly.

Her anxiety had about it something maternal. It gave him for the first
time a feeling of being at home in Princeton.

"I got through to-day," he said.

"Good! Good!"

She nodded toward the study.

"Then you have made him very happy."

"I always want to," George said. "That's a worthy ambition, isn't it?"

She looked at him gropingly, as if she almost caught his allusion.


IX

As George let himself out of the gate a closed automobile turned the
corner and drew up at the curb. The driver sprang down and opened the
door. Betty Alston's white-clad figure emerged and crossed the sidewalk
while George pulled off his cap and held the gate open for her. He
suffered an ugly suspense. What would she say? Would she speak to him at
all? Phrases that Sylvia might have used to her flashed through his
mind; then he saw her smile as usual. She held out her hand. The warmth
of her fingers seemed to reach his mind, making it less unyielding. The
fancy put him on his guard.

"I know you passed," she said.

He walked with her across the narrow yard to the porch.

"I think so, to-day."

She paused with her foot on the lower step. The light from the corner
disclosed her face, puzzled and undecided; and his uneasiness returned.

"I am just returning this," she said, holding up a book. "I'd be glad to
drop you at your lodging----"

"I'll wait."

While she was inside he paced the sidewalk. There had been a question in
her face, but not the vital one, which, indeed, she wouldn't have
troubled to ask. Sylvia had not recognized him, or, recognizing him, had
failed to give him away.

Betty came gracefully down the steps, and George followed her into the
pleasant obscurity of the automobile. He could scarcely see her white
figure, but he became aware again of the delightful and singular perfume
of her tawny hair. If Sylvia had spoken he never could have sat so close
to her. He had no business, anyway----

She snapped on the light. She laughed.

"I said you were bound to meet Lambert Planter."

He had started on false ground. At any moment the ground might give
way.

"If I wasn't quite honest about that the other morning," he said, "it
was because I had met Lambert Planter, but under circumstances I wanted
to forget."

"I'm sorry," she said, softly, "that I reminded you; but he seemed glad
to see you this morning. It is all right now, isn't it?"

"Yes," he answered, doubtfully.

That thrilling quality of her voice became more pronounced.

"I'm glad. For he's a good friend to have. He's a very real person; I
mean, a man who's likely to do big things, don't you think?"

"Yes," he said again.

Why was he conscious of resentment? Why did he ask himself quickly if
Lambert thought of her with equal benevolence? He pulled himself up
short. What earthly business was it of his what Betty Alston and Lambert
Planter thought of each other? But he regretted the briefness of his
companionship with Betty in the unaccustomed luxury of the car. It
surrounded him with a settled and congenial atmosphere; it lessened,
after the first moments, the sharp taste of the ambition to which he had
condemned himself.

"Don't worry," she said, as he descended at his lodging, "you'll get in.
Dear old Squibs told me so."

He experienced a strong impulse to touch her hand again. He thanked her,
said good-night, and turned resolutely away.

It was only after long scrutiny of Sylvia's photograph that he attacked
Bailly's marked passages. Again and again he reminded himself that he
had actually seen her that day, and that she had either not remembered
him, or had, with a deliberate cruelty, sought to impress him with his
ugly insignificance in a crowded and pleasurable landscape.

Then why should this other girl of the same class treat him so
differently?

The answer came glibly. For that instant he was wholly distasteful to
himself.

"Because she doesn't know."

He picked up a piece of the broken riding crop, flushing hotly. He
would detach himself from the landscape for Sylvia. He would use that
crop yet.


X

He worked all the next day in the examination hall. He purposely chose a
seat in the row behind Goodhue. Five or six men, clearly all friends of
Goodhue's, sat near him, each modelled more or less as he was. George
noticed one exception, a short fellow who stood out from the entire
room. At first George thought it was because he was older, then he
decided it was the light moustache, the thick hair, the eyes that lacked
lustre, the long, white fingers. The man barely lifted his examination
sheets. He glanced at them once, then set to work. He was the first to
rise and hand his papers in. The rest paused, stared enviously, and
sighed. George heard Goodhue say to the man next him:

"How do you suppose Spike does it?"

George wondered why they called the dainty little man Spike.

He was slow and painstaking himself, and the room was fairly well
emptied before he finished. Except for the French, he was satisfied. He
took a deep breath. The ordeal was over. For the first time in more than
two months he was his own master. He could do anything he pleased.

First of all, he hurried to Squibs Bailly.

"Lend me a novel--something exciting," he began. "No, I wouldn't open a
text-book even for you to-night. The schedule's dead and buried, sir,
and you haven't given me another."

Bailly's wrinkled face approved.

"You wouldn't be coming at me this way if there was any doubt. You shall
have your novel. I'm afraid----"

He paused, laughing.

"I mean, my task with you is about done. You've more brain than a
dinosaur. It is variously wrinkled where once it was like a babe's.
Except for the French, you should handle your courses without superhuman
effort. Don't ever let me hear of your getting a condition. Your next
schedule will come from Stringham and Green."

He limped to a bookcase and drew out a volume bound in red.

"Without entirely wasting your time, you may amuse yourself with that."

"'Treasure Island.'"

George frowned doubtfully.

"We studied something about this man. If he's good enough to get in the
school books maybe he isn't just what I'm looking for to-night."

"Have you ever perused Nick Carter, or, perhaps Old Sleuth?" Bailly
asked.

George smiled.

"I know I have to forget all that."

"In intellectual circles," Bailly agreed.

He glanced slyly around.

"I've scanned such matter," he whispered, "with a modicum of enjoyment,
so I can assure you the book you have in your hand possesses nearly
equal merit, yet you may discuss it without losing caste in the most
exalted places; which would seem to indicate that human judgment is
based on manner rather than matter."

"You mean," George said, frowning, "that if a man does a rotten thing it
is the way he does it rather than the thing itself that is judged?"

Bailly limped up and down, his hands behind his back. He faced George
with a little show of bewildered temper.

"See here, Freshman Morton, I've taught you to think too fast. You can't
fasten a scheme of ethics on any silly aphorism of mine. Go home and
read your book. Dwell with picturesque pirates, and walk with flawless
and touching virtue. Delve for buried treasure. That, at least, is
always worth while."

George's attitude was a challenge.

"Remembering," he said, softly, "to dig in a nice manner even if your
hands do get dirty."

Bailly sprawled in his chair and waved George away. "You need a
preacher," he said, "not a tutor."


XI

In his room George opened his book and read happily. Never in his life
had he been so relaxed and content. Entangled in the adventures of
colourful characters he didn't hear at first the sliding of stealthy
feet in the hall, whispered consultations, sly knockings at various
doors. Then there came a rap at his own door, and he glanced up,
surprised, sweeping the photograph and the broken crop into the table
drawer.

"Come in," he called, not heartily.

A dozen young men crowded slowly into the room. They wore orange and
black jerseys and caps brilliant with absurd devices. They had the
appearance of judges of some particularly atrocious criminal. George had
no doubt that he was the man, for those were the days just before hazing
was frowned out of existence by an effete conservatism.

"Get up, you Freshman," one hissed. "Put on your hat and coat, and
follow us."

George was on the point of refusing, had his hands half up in fact, to
give them a fight; but a thrill entered his soul that he should be
qualified as a victim of such high-handed nonsense which acknowledged
him as an entity in the undergraduate world. He arose gladly, ready to
obey. Then someone grunted with disgust.

"Come on. Duck out of here."

"What for? This guy looks fresh as salt mackerel."

"It's Morton. We can't monkey with him."

The others expressed disappointment and thronged through the door in
search of victims more available. George became belligerent for an
opposite reason.

"Why not?" he demanded.

The leader smiled in friendly fashion.

"You'll get all the hazing you need down at the field."

As the last filed out and closed the door George smiled appreciation.
Even among the Sophomores he was spotted, a privileged and an important
character.

The next morning, packed with the nervous Freshmen in a lecture room, he
heard his name read out with the sections. He fought his way into the
university offices to scan the list of conditioned men. He didn't appear
on a single slip. He had even managed the easy French paper. He attended
to the formalities of matriculating. He was free to play football, to
take up the by-no-means considerable duties of the laundry agency, to
make friends. He had completed the first lap.

When he reported at the field that afternoon he found that the Freshmen
had a coach of their own, a young man who possessed the unreal violence
of a Sophomore, but he knew the game, and the extra invective with which
he drove George indicated that Stringham and Green had confided to him
their hopes.

The squad was large. Later it would dwindle and its members be thrown
into a more intimate contact. Goodhue was there, a promising
quarterback. Rogers toiled with a hopeless enthusiasm. George smiled,
appreciating the other's logic. It was a good thing to try for the team,
even though one had no chance of making it. As a matter of fact, Rogers
disappeared at the first weeding-out.

The opening fortnight was wholly pleasant--a stressing of fundamentals
that demanded little severe physical effort. Nor did the curriculum
place any grave demands on George. During the evenings he frequently
supplemented his work at the field with a brisk cross-country run, more
often than not in the vicinity of the Alston place. He could see the
lights in the huge house, and he tried to visualize that interior where,
perhaps, men of the Goodhue stamp sat with Betty. He studied those
fortunates, meantime, and the other types that surrounded him. There
were many men of a sort, of the Rogers sort particularly, who
continually suggested their receptivity; and he was invariably
courteous--from a distance, as he had seen Goodhue respond to Rogers.
For George had his eyes focused now. He had seen the best.

The election of Freshmen class officers outlined several facts. The
various men put up for office were unknown to the class in general, were
backed by little crowds from their own schools. Men from less important
schools, and men, like George, with no preparatory past, voted wild.
These school groups, he saw, clung together; would determine, it was
clear, the social progress through college of their members. That
inevitably pointed to the upper-class club houses on Prospect Street.
George had seen them from his first days at University Field, but until
now they had, naturally enough, failed to impress him with any immediate
interest. He desired the proper contacts for the molding of his own
deportment and, to an extent even greater, for the bearing they would
have on his battle for money and position after he should leave college.
But it became clear to him now that the contest for Prospect Street had
begun on the first day, even earlier, back in the preparatory schools.

Were such contacts possible in a serviceable measure without success in
that selfish, headlong race? Was it practicable to draw the attention of
the eager, half-blind runners to one outside the sacred little groups?
Football would open certain doors, but if there was one best club he
would have that or nothing. It might be wiser to stand brazenly aloof,
posing as above such infantile jealousies. The future would decide, but
as he left the place of the elections he had an empty feeling, a
sharpened appreciation of the hazards that lay ahead.

Goodhue would be pointed for the highest. Goodhue would lead in many
ways. He was elected the first president of the class.

The poor or earnest men, ignorant of everything outside their books,
come from scattered homes, quite friendless, gravitated together in what
men like Rogers considered a social quarantine. Rogers, indeed, ventured
to warn George of the risk of contagion. As chance dictated George
chatted with such creatures; once or twice even walked across the campus
with them.

"You're making a mistake," Rogers advised, "being seen with polers like
Allen."

"I've been seen with him twice that I can think of," George answered.
"Why?"

"That lot'll queer you."

George put his hand on Rogers' shoulder.

"See here. If I'm so small that that will queer me, you can put me down
as damned."

He walked on with that infrequently experienced sensation of having made
an advance. Yet he couldn't quite see why. He had responded to an
instinct that must have been his even in the days at Oakmont, when he
had been less than human. If he didn't see more of men like Allen it was
because they had nothing to offer him; nothing whatever. Goodhue had----

When their paths crossed on the campus now Goodhue nodded, for each day
they met at the field, both certainties, if they escaped injury, for the
Freshmen eleven.

Football had ceased to be unalloyed pleasure. Stringham that fall used
the Freshmen rather more than the scrub as a punching bag for the
varsity. The devoted youngsters would take punishment from three or four
successive teams from the big squad. They became, consequently, as hard
as iron. Frequently they played a team of varsity substitutes off its
feet. George had settled into the backfield. He was fast with the ball,
but he found it difficult to follow his interference, losing patience
sometimes, and desiring to cut off by himself. Even so he made
consistent gains through the opposing line. On secondary defence he was
rather too efficient. Stringham was continually cautioning him not to
tackle the varsity pets too viciously. After one such rebuke Goodhue
unbent to sympathy.

"If they worked the varsity as hard as they do us Stringham wouldn't
have to be so precious careful of his brittle backs. Just the same,
Morton, I would rather play with you than against you."

George smiled, but he didn't bother to answer. Let Goodhue come around
again.

George's kicking from the start outdistanced the best varsity punts. The
stands, sprinkled with undergraduates and people from the town, would
become noisy with handclapping as his spirals arched down the field.

Squibs Bailly, George knew, was always there, probably saying, "I kicked
that ball. I made that run," and he had. The more you thought of it, the
more it became comprehensible that he had.

The afternoon George slipped outside a first varsity tackle, and dodged
two varsity backs, running forty yards for a touchdown, Squibs limped on
the field, followed by Betty Alston. The scrimmaging was over. The
Freshmen, triumphant because of George's feat, streaked toward the field
house. Goodhue ran close to George. Bailly caught George's arm. Goodhue
paused, calling out:

"Hello, Betty!"

At first Betty seemed scarcely to see Goodhue. She held out her hand to
George.

"That was splendid. Don't forget that you're going to make me
congratulate you this way next fall after the big games."

"I'll do my best. I want you to," George said.

Again he responded to the frank warmth of her fingers that seemed
unconsciously endeavouring to make more pliable the hard surface of his
mind.

"The strength of a lion," Bailly was saying, "united to the cruel
cunning of the serpent. Heaven be praised you didn't seek the higher
education at Yale or Harvard."

Betty called a belated greeting to Goodhue.

"Hello, Dicky! Wasn't it a real run? I feel something of a sponsor. I
told him before college opened he would be a great player."

Goodhue's surprise was momentarily apparent.

"It was rather nice to see those big fellows dumped," he said.

Betty went closer to him.

"Aren't you coming out to dinner soon? I'll promise Green you won't
break training."

The warm, slender fingers were no longer at George's mind. He felt
abruptly repulsed. He wanted only to get away. Her eyes caught his, and
she smiled.

"And bring Mr. Morton. I'm convinced he'll never come unless somebody
takes him by the hand."

George glanced at her hand. He had a whimsical impulse to reach out for
it, to close his eyes, to be led.

Heavy feet hurried behind the little group. A voice filled with rancour
and disgust cried out:

"You standing here without blankets just to enjoy the autumn breezes?
You ought to have better sense, Mr. Bailly."

"It's my fault, Green," Betty laughed.

"That's different," the trainer admitted, gallantly. "You can't expect a
woman to have much sense. Get to the showers now, and on the run."

Goodhue and George trotted off.

"I didn't know you were a friend of Betty Alston's," Goodhue said.

George didn't answer. Goodhue didn't say anything else.


XII

Often after those long, pounding afternoons George returned to his room,
wondering dully, as he had done last summer, why the deuce he did it.
Sylvia's picture stared the same answer, and he would turn with a sigh
to one of the novels Bailly loaned him regularly. Bailly was of great
value there, too, for he chose the books carefully, and George was
commencing to learn that as a man reads so is he very likely to think.
Whenever he spoke now he was careful to modulate his voice, to choose
his words, never to be heard without a reason.

The little fellow with the moustache whom the Goodhue crowd called Spike
met him on the campus one day after practice.

"My name," he announced in a high-pitched, slurred voice, "is Wandel.
You may not realize it, but you are a very great man, Morton."

George looked him over, astonished. He had difficulty not to mock the
other's manner, nearly effeminate.

"Why am I great, Mr. Wandel?"

"Anybody," Wandel answered in his singing voice, "who does one thing
better than others is inevitably great."

George smiled vindictively.

"I suppose I ought to return the compliment. What do you do?"

Wandel wasn't ruffled.

"Very many things. I brew good tea for one. What about a cup now? Come
to my rooms. They're just here, in Blair tower."

George weighed the invitation. Wandel was beyond doubt of the
fortunates, yet curiously apart from them. George's diplomacy required a
forcing of the fortunates to seek him. Wandel, for that matter, had
sought. Where George might have refused a first invitation from Goodhue
he accepted Wandel's, because he was anxious to know the man's real
purpose in asking him.

"All right. Thanks. But I haven't much time. I want to do some reading
before dinner."

He hadn't imagined anything like Wandel's room existed in college, or
could be conceived or executed by one of college age. The study was
large and high with a broad casement window. The waning light increased
the values Wandel had evidently sought. The wall covering and the
draperies at the three doors and the window were a dead shade of green
that, in fact, suggested a withdrawal from life nearly supernatural, at
least medieval. The half-dozen pictures were designed to complete this
impression. They were primitives--an awkward but lovely Madonna, a
procession of saints who seemed deformed by their experiences, grotesque
conceptions of biblical encounters. There were heavy rugs, also green in
foundation; and, with wide, effective spaces between, stood
uncomfortable Gothic chairs, benches, and tables.

Two months ago George would have expressed amazement, perhaps
admiration. Now he said nothing, but he longed for Squibs' opinion of
the room. He questioned what it reflected of the pompous little man who
had brought him.

Wandel stooped and lighted the fire. He switched the heavy green
curtains over the window. In a corner a youth stirred and yawned.

"Hello, Dalrymple," Wandel said. "Waited long? You know that very great
man, Morton?"

The increasing firelight played on Dalrymple's face, a countenance
without much expression, intolerant, if anything, but in a far weaker
sense than Sylvia's assurance. George recognized him. He had seen him
accompany Goodhue through the crowd the day of the first examination.
Dalrymple didn't disturb himself.

"The football player? How do. Damn tea, Spike. You've got whiskey and a
siphon."

George's hand had been ready. He was thankful he hadn't offered it. In
that moment a dislike was born, not very positive; the emotion one has
for an unwholesome animal.

Wandel disappeared. After a moment he came in, wearing a fantastic
embroidered dressing gown of the pervading dead green tone. He lighted a
spirit lamp, and, while the water heated, got out a tea canister, cups,
boxes of biscuits, cigarettes, bottles, and glasses. Dalrymple poured a
generous drink. Wandel took a smaller one.

"You," he said to George, "being a very great man, will have some tea."

"I'll have some tea, anyway," George answered.

The door opened. Goodhue strolled in. His eyebrows lifted when he saw
George.

"Do you know you're in bad company, Morton?"

"I believe so," George answered.

Wandel was pleased. George saw Goodhue glance a question at Dalrymple.
Dalrymple merely stared.

They sat about, sipping, talking of nothing in particular, and the
curious room was full of an interrogation. George lost his earlier fancy
of being under Wandel's inspection. It was evident to him now that
Wandel was the man to do his inspecting first. Why the deuce had he
asked him here? Dalrymple and Goodhue were clearly puzzled by the same
question.

When he had emptied his cup George rose and put on his cap.

"Thanks for the cup of tea, Wandel."

"Don't go," Wandel urged.

He waved his hands helplessly.

"But, since you're a very distinguished person, I suppose I can't keep
you. Come again, any day this time. Every day."

The question in Goodhue's eyes increased. Dalrymple altered his position
irritably, and refilled his glass. George didn't say good-bye, waiting
for the first move from him. Dalrymple, however, continued to sip,
unaffected by this departure.

Goodhue, on the other hand, after a moment's hesitation, followed George
out. When they had reached the tower archway Goodhue paused. The broken
light from an iron-framed lamp exposed the curiosity and indecision in
his eyes.

"Have you any idea, Morton," he asked, "what Spike's up to with you; I
mean, why he's so darned hospitable all of a sudden?"

George shook his head. He was quite frank.

"I'm not so dull," he said, "that I haven't been wondering about that
myself."

Goodhue smiled, and unexpectedly held out his hand.

"Good-night, see you at the field to-morrow."

"Why," George asked as he released that coveted grasp, "do you call
Wandel 'Spike'?"

Goodhue's voice was uneasy in spite of the laugh with which he coloured
it.

"Maybe it's because he's so sharp."


XIII

George saw a day or two later a professor's criticism in the _Daily
Princetonian_ of the current number of the _Nassau Literary Magazine_.
Driggs Wandel, because of a poem, was excitedly greeted as a man with a
touch of genius. George borrowed a copy of the _Lit_ from a neighbour,
and read a haunting, unreal bit of verse that seemed a part of the room
in which it had probably been written. Obsessed by the practicality of
the little man, George asked himself just what Wandel had to gain by
this performance. He carried the whole puzzle to Bailly that night, and
was surprised to learn that Wandel had impressed himself already on the
faculty.

"This verse isn't genius," Bailly said, "but it proves that the man has
an abnormal control of effect, and he does what he does with no apparent
effort. He'll probably be managing editor of the _Lit_ and the
_Princetonian_, for I understand he's out for that, too. He's going to
make himself felt in his class and in the entire undergraduate body.
Don't undervalue him. Have you stopped to think, Morton, that he still
wears a moustache? Revolutionary! Has he overawed the Sophomores, or has
he too many friends in the upper classes?"

Bailly limped up and down, ill at ease, seeking words.

"I don't know how to advise you. I believe he'll help you delve after
some treasure, though the stains on his own hands won't be visible.
Whether it's just the treasure you want is another matter. Be
inscrutable yourself. Accept his invitations. If you can, find out what
he's up to without committing yourself. You can put it down that he
isn't after you for nothing."

"But why?" George demanded.

Bailly shrugged his narrow shoulders.

"Anyway, I've told you what I could, and you'll go your own way whether
you agree or not."

George did, as a matter of fact. His curiosity carried him a number of
times to Wandel's rooms. Practically always Dalrymple sat aloof,
sullenly sipping whiskey which had no business there. He met a number of
other men of the same crowd who talked football in friendly enough
fashion; and once or twice the suave little fellow made a point of
asking him for a particular day or hour. Always Wandel would introduce
him to some new man, offering him, George felt, as a specimen to be
accepted as a triumph of the Wandel judgment. And in every fresh face
George saw the question he continually asked himself.

Wandel's campaign accomplished one result: Men like Rogers became more
obsequious, considering George already a unit of that hallowed circle.
But George wasn't fooled. He knew very well that he wasn't.

Goodhue, however, was more friendly. Football, after all, George felt,
was quite as responsible for that as Betty Alston or Wandel; for it was
the combination of Goodhue at quarter and George at half that accounted
for the team's work against the varsity, and that beat the Yale and the
Harvard Freshmen. Such a consistent and effectual partnership couldn't
help drawing its members closer out of admiration, out of joy in
success, out of a ponderable dependence that each learned to place upon
the other. That conception survived the Freshman season. George no
longer felt he had to be careful with Goodhue. Goodhue had even found
his lodgings.

"Not palatial," George explained, "because--you may not know it--I am
working my way through college."

Goodhue's voice was a trifle envious.

"I know. It must give you a fine feeling to do that."

Then Betty's vague invitation materialized in a note which mentioned a
date and the fact that Goodhue would be there. Goodhue himself suggested
that George should call at his rooms that evening so they could drive
out together. George had never been before, had not suspected that
Dalrymple lived with Goodhue. The fact, learned at the door, which bore
the two cards, disquieted him, filled him with a sense nearly
premonitory.

When he had entered in response to Goodhue's call his doubt increased.
The room seemed inimical to him, yet it was a normal enough place. What
did it harbour that he was afraid of, that he was reluctant even to look
for?

Goodhue was nearly ready. Dalrymple lounged on a window seat. He glanced
at George languidly.

"Will say, Morton, you did more than your share against those Crimson
Freshmen Saturday."

George nodded without answering. He had found the object the room
contained for which he had experienced a premonitory fear. On one of the
two desks stood an elaborately framed replica of the portrait he himself
possessed of Sylvia Planter. Its presence there impressed him as a
wrong, for to study and commune with that pictured face he had fancied
his unique privilege. Nor did its presence in this room seem quite
honest, for Sylvia, he was willing to swear, wasn't the type to scatter
her likenesses among young men. George had an instinct to turn on
Dalrymple and demand a history of the print, since Goodhue, he was
certain, wouldn't have placed it there without authority. After all,
such authority might exist. What did he know of Sylvia aside from her
beauty, her arrogance, and her breeding? That was it. Her breeding made
the exposure of her portrait here questionable.

"What you staring at?" Dalrymple asked, sullenly.

"Is this your desk?" George demanded.

"Yes. Why?"

George faced him abruptly.

"I was looking at that photograph."

"What for?" Dalrymple demanded, sitting up.

"Because," George answered, evenly, "it happens to be where one sees
it."

Dalrymple flushed.

"Deuced pretty girl," he said with an affectation of indifference. "Of
course you don't know her."

"I have seen her," George said, shortly.

He felt that a challenge had been passed and accepted. He raised his
voice.

"How about it, Goodhue?"

"Coming."

Dalrymple opened his mouth as if to speak, but Goodhue slipped into the
room, and George and he went down the stairs and climbed into Goodhue's
runabout.

"I didn't know," George said when they had started, "that you lived with
Dalrymple."

"We were put together at school, so it seemed simple to start out here."

George was glad to fancy a slight colour of apology, as if such a
companionship needed a reason.

It was a pleasant and intimate little dinner to which they drove. Mr.
and Mrs. Alston recollected meeting George at the Baillys', and they
were kind about his football. A friend of Betty's from a neighbouring
house made the sixth. George was not uncomfortable. His glass had shown
him that in a dinner suit he was rather better looking than he had
thought. Observation had diminished his dread of social lapses. There
flowed, however, rather too much talk of strange worlds, which included
some approaching gaieties in New York.

"You," Betty said casually to him, "must run up to my great affair."

Her aunt, it appeared, would engineer that a short time before the
holidays. George was vague. The prospect of a ballroom was terrifying.
He had danced very little, and never with the type of women who would
throng Betty Alston's debut. Yet he wanted to go.

"Betty," her mother said, dryly, "will have all the lions she can trap."

George received an unpleasant impression of having been warned. It
didn't affect him strongly, because warnings were wasted there; he was
too much the slave of a photograph and a few intolerable memories.
Sylvia would almost certainly be at that dance.

Wandel appeared after dinner.

"I tried to get Dolly to come," he said, "but he was in a most
villainous temper about something, and couldn't be budged. Don't mind
saying he missed a treat. I hired a pert little mare at Marlin's. If I
can find anything in town nearly as good I'll break the two to tandem
this winter."

George's suppressed enthusiasm blazed.

"I'd like to help you. I'd give a good deal for a real fight with a
horse."

He was afraid he had plunged in too fast. He met the surprise of the
others by saying he had played here and there with other people's
horses; but the conversation had drifted to a congenial topic, and it
got to polo.

"Because a man was killed here once," Wandel said, "is no reason why the
game should be damned forever."

"If you young men," Mr. Alston offered, "want to get some ponies down in
the spring, or experiment with what I've got, you're welcome to play
here all you please, and it might be possible to arrange games with
scrub teams from Philadelphia and New York."

"Do you play, Mr. Morton?" Betty asked, interestedly.

"I've scrubbed around," he said, uncertainly.

She laughed.

"Then he's a master. That's what he told dear old Squibs about his
football."

George wanted to get away from horses. He could score only through
action. Talking was dangerous. He was relieved when he could leave with
Goodhue and Wandel.

The runabout scurried out of Wandel's way. The pert little mare sensed a
rival in the automobile, and gave Wandel all the practice he wanted.
George smiled at the busy little man as his cart slithered from side to
side of the driveway.

"That's Spike's one weakness," Goodhue laughed as they hurried off.
"He's not a natural horseman, but he loves the beasts, so he takes his
falls. By the way, I rather think I can guess what he's up to with you."

"What?" George asked.

Goodhue shook his head.

"Learn from Spike. Anyway, I may be wrong."

Then why had Goodhue spoken at all? To put him on his guard?

"Wandel," George promised himself, "will get away with nothing as far as
I am concerned."

Yet all that night the thought of the little man made him uncomfortable.


XIV

George watched his first big varsity game the following Saturday. It was
the last of the season, against Yale. He sat with Goodhue and other
members of the Freshman eleven in an advantageous part of the stands.
The moment the blue squad, greeted by a roar, trotted on the field, he
recognized Lambert Planter's rangy figure. Lambert's reputation as a
fullback had come to Princeton ahead of him, and it had scarcely been
exaggerated. Once he had torn through the line he gave the Princeton
backs all they wanted to do. He kicked for Yale. Defensively he was the
deadliest man on the field. He, George and Goodhue agreed, would
determine the outcome. As, through him, the balance of the contest
commenced to tip, George experienced a biting restlessness. It wasn't
the prospect of the defeat of Princeton by Yale that angered him so much
as the fact that Lambert Planter would unquestionably be the cause.
George felt it unjust that rules should exist excluding him from that
bruising and muddy contest. More than anything else just then he wanted
to be on the field, stopping Planter, avoiding the reluctance of such an
issue.

"We ought to be out there, Morton," Goodhue muttered. "If nothing
happens, we will be next year."

"It's that fellow Planter," George answered. "He could be stopped."

"You could stop him," Goodhue said. "You could outkick him."

George's face was grim.

"I'm stronger than Planter," he said, simply. "I could beat him."

The varsity, however, couldn't. Lambert, during the last quarter,
slipped over the line for the deciding touchdown. The game ended in a
dusky and depressing autumn haze. George and Goodhue watched sullenly
the enemy hosts carry Planter and the other blue players about the
field. Appearing as if they had survived a disaster, they joined the
crowd of men and women, relatives and friends of the players, near the
field house. The vanquished and the substitutes had already slipped
through and out of sight. The first of the steaming Yale men appeared
and threaded a path toward the steps. Lambert, because he had been
honoured most, was the last to arrive, and at that moment out of the
multitude there came into George's vision faces that he knew, as if they
had waited to detach themselves for this spectacular advent.

He saw the most impressive one first of all, and he stood, as he had
frequently stood before her portrait, staring in a mood of wilful
obstinacy. It was only for a few moments, and she was quite some
distance away. Before he could appreciate the chance, she had withdrawn
herself, after a quick, approving tap of her brother's shoulder, among
the curious, crowding people. George had seen her face glow with a happy
pride in spite of her effort at repression; but in the second face which
he noticed there was no emotion visible at all. The hero's mother simply
nodded. Dalrymple stood between mother and daughter, smiling inanely.

Lambert forged ahead, filthy and wet. The steam, like vapour from an
overworked animal, wavered about him. The Baillys and the Alstons pushed
close to George and Goodhue, who were in Lambert's path, pressed there
and held by the anxious people.

At sight of Betty, Lambert paused and stretched out his hand. She was,
George thought, whiter than ever.

"You'll say hello even to an Eli?"

She gave her hand quickly, the colour invading her pallor. For an
instant George thought Lambert was going to draw her closer, saw his
lips twitch, heard him say:

"Don't hold it against me, Betty."

Certainly something was understood between these two, or Lambert, at
least, believed so.

Betty freed her hand and caught at George's arm.

"Look at him," she said clearly, indicating Planter. "You're going to
take care of him next fall. You're not going to let him laugh at us
again."

George managed a smile.

"I'll take care of him, Miss Alston."

Lambert's dirty face expanded.

"These are threats! And it's--George. Then we're to have a return bout
next fall. I'll look forward to it. Hello, Dick. Good-bye, Betty. Till
next fall--George."

He passed on, leaving an impression of confidence and conquest.

"Why," Betty said, impulsively, in George's ear, "does he speak to you
that way? Why does he call you George like that?"

For a moment he looked at her steadily, appealingly.

"It's partly my own fault," he said at last, "but it hurts."

Her voice was softer than before.

"That's wrong. You mustn't let little things hurt, George."

For the first time in his memory he felt a stinging at his eyes, the
desire for tears. He didn't misunderstand. Her use of his first name was
not a precedent. It had been balm applied to a wound that she had only
been able to see was painful. Yet, as he walked away with Goodhue, he
felt as if he had been baptized again.


XV

Wandel, quite undisturbed, joined them.

"You and Dicky," the little man said, "look as if you had come out of a
bad wreck. What's up? It's only a game."

"Of course you're right," George answered, "but you have to play some
games desperately hard if you want to win."

"Now what are you driving at, great man?" Wandel wanted to know.

"Come on, Spike," Goodhue said, irritably. "You're always looking for
double meanings."

George walked on with them, desolately aware of many factors of his life
gone awry. The game; Lambert's noticeable mockery, all the more
unbearable because of its unaffectedness; Dalrymple's adjacence to
Sylvia--these remembrances stung, the last most of all.

"Come on up, you two," Goodhue suggested as they approached the building
in which he lived, "I believe Dolly's giving tea to Sylvia Planter and
her mother."

George wanted to see if the photograph was still there, but he couldn't
risk it. He shook his head.

"Not into the camp of the enemy?" Wandel laughed.

Of course, George told himself as he walked off, Wandel's words couldn't
possibly have held any double meaning.

He fought it out that night, sleeping scarcely at all. In the rush of
his progress here he had failed to realize how little he had really
advanced toward his ultimate goal. Lambert had offhand, perhaps
unintentionally, shown him that afternoon how wide the intervening space
still stretched. Was it because of moral cowardice that he shrank from
challenging a crossing? The answer to such a challenge might easily mean
the destruction of all he had built up, the heavy conditioning of his
future which now promised so abundantly.

He faced her picture with his eyes resolute, his jaw thrust out.

"I'll do it," he told the lifeless print. "I'll make you know me. I'll
teach your brother not to treat me as a servant who has forgotten his
place."

The last, in any case, couldn't be safely put off. Lambert's manner had
already aroused Betty's interest. Had she known its cause she might not
have resented it so sweetly for George. There was no point in fretting
any more. His mind was made up to challenge at the earliest possible
moment.

In furtherance of his resolution he visited his tailor the next day, and
during the evening called at the Baillys'. He came straight to the
point.

"I want some dancing lessons," he said. "Do you know anybody?"

Bailly limped up, put his hands on George's shoulder, and studied him.

"Is this traceable to Wandel?"

"No. To what I told you last summer."

"He's going to Betty Alston's dance," Mrs. Bailly cried.

"If I'm asked," George admitted, "but as a general principle----"

Mrs. Bailly interrupted, assuming control.

"Move that table and the chairs," she directed the two men. "You'll keep
my husband's secret--tinkling music hidden away between grand opera
records. It will come in handy now."

George protested, but she had her own way. Bailly sat by, puffing at his
pipe, at first scornful.

"I hate to see a football player pirouetting like a clown."

But in a little while he was up, awkwardly illustrating steps, his
cheeks flushed, his cold pipe dangling from his lips.

"You dance very well as it is," Mrs. Bailly told George. "You do need a
little quieting. You must learn to remember that the ballroom isn't a
gridiron and your partner the ball."

And at the end of a fortnight she told him he was tamed and ready for
the soft and perfumed exercise of the dance floor.

He was afraid Betty wouldn't remember. Her invitation had been informal,
his response almost a refusal.

On free afternoons Goodhue and he often ran together, trying to keep in
condition, already feeling that the outcome of next year's big games
would depend on them. They trotted openly through the Alston place,
hoping for a glimpse of Betty as a break in their grind. When she saw
them from the house she would come out and chat for a time, her yellow
hair straying in the wind, her cheeks flushed from the cold. During
these brief conferences it was made clear that she had not forgotten,
and that George would go up with Goodhue and be a guest at his home the
night of the dance.

George was grateful for that quality of remoteness in Goodhue which at
first had irritated him. Now he was well within Goodhue's vision, and
acceptably so; but the young man had not shown the slightest interest in
his past or his lack of the right friends before coming to Princeton. At
any moment he might.

The Goodhue house was uptown between Fifth and Madison avenues. It was
as unexpected to George as Wandel's green study had been. The size of
its halls and rooms, the tasteful extravagance of its decorations, the
quiet, liveried servants took his breath. It was difficult not to say
something, to withhold from his glance his admiration and his lack of
habit.

There he was at last, handing his hat and coat to one who bent
obsequiously. He felt a great contempt. He told himself he was unjust,
as unjust as Sylvia, but the contempt persisted.

There were details here more compelling than anything he had seen or
fancied at Oakmont. The entire household seemed to move according to a
feudal pattern. Goodhue's father and mother welcomed George, because
their son had brought him, with a quiet assurance. Mrs. Goodhue, George
felt, might even appreciate what he was doing. That was the outstanding,
the feudal, quality of both. They had an air of unprejudiced judgment,
of removal from any selfish struggle, of being placed beyond question.

Goodhue and George dined at a club that night. They saw Wandel and
Dalrymple, the latter flushed and talking louder than he should have
done in an affected voice. They went to the theatre, and afterward drove
up Fifth Avenue to Betty's party. George was dazzled, and every moment
conscious of the effort to prevent Goodhue's noticing it. His excitement
increased as he came to the famous establishment in the large ballroom
of which Betty was waiting, and, perhaps, already, Sylvia. To an extent
the approaching culmination of his own campaign put him at ease; lifted
him, as it were, above details; left him free to face the moment of his
challenge.

The lower halls were brilliant with pretty, eager faces, noisy with
chatter and laughter, a trifle heady from an infiltration of perfumes.

Wandel joined them upstairs and took George's card, returning it after a
time nearly filled.

"When you see anybody you particularly want to dance with," he advised
secretly, "just cut in without formality. The mere fact of your presence
ought to be introduction enough. You see everybody here knows, or thinks
he knows, everybody else."

George wondered why Wandel went out of his way, and in that particular
direction. Did the little man suspect? The succeeding moments brushed
the question aside.

Betty was radiant, lovelier in her white-and-yellow fashion than George
had ever seen her. He shrank a little from their first contact, all the
more startling to him because he was so little accustomed to the ritual
familiarity of dancing. With his arm around her, with her hand in his,
with her golden hair brushing his cheek, with her lips and eyes smiling
up at him, he felt like one who steals. Why not? Didn't people win their
most prized possessions through theft of one kind or another? It was
because those pliant fingers were always at his mind that he wanted to
release them, wanted to run away from Betty since she always made him
desire to tell her the truth.

"I'm glad you could come. It isn't as bad as football, is it? Have we
any more? If I show signs of distress do cut in if you're not too busy."

He overcame his fear of collisions, avoiding other couples smoothly and
rhythmically. Dalrymple, he observed, was less successful, apologizing
in a high, excited voice. As in a haze George watched a procession of
elderly women, young girls, and men of every age, with his own tall
figure and slightly anxious face greeting him now and then from a
mirror. This repeated and often-unexpected recognition encouraged him.
He was bigger and better looking than most; in the glasses, at least, he
appeared as well-dressed. More than once he heard girls say:

"Who is that big chap with Betty Alston?"

With all his heart he wanted to ask Betty why she had been so kind to
him from the beginning, why she was so kind now. He longed to tell her
how it had affected him. She glanced up curiously. Without realizing it
his grasp had tightened. He relaxed it, wondering what had been in his
mind. It was this odd proximity to a beautiful girl who had been kind to
him that had for a moment swung him from his real purpose in coming
here, the only purpose he had. He resumed his inspection of the crowding
faces. He didn't see Lambert or Sylvia. Had he been wrong? It was
incredible they shouldn't appear.

The music stopped.

"Thanks," he said. "Three after this."

His voice was wistful.

"I did like that."

He desired to tell her that he didn't care to dance with any one else,
except Sylvia, of course.

"I enjoyed it, too. Will you take me back?"

But her partner met them on the way, and he commenced to trail his.

It was halfway through the next number that he knew he had not planned
futilely. It was like Sylvia to arrive in that fashion--a distracting
element in a settled picture, or as one beyond the general run for whom
a special welcome was a matter of course. To George's ears the orchestra
played louder, as if to call attention to her. To his eyes the dancers
slackened their pace. The chatter certainly diminished, and nearly
everyone glanced toward the door where she stood a little in advance of
her mother and two men.

George was able to judge reasonably. In dress and appearance she was the
most striking woman in the room. Her dark colouring sprang at one,
demanding attention. George saw Dalrymple unevenly force a path in her
direction. He caught his breath. The dance resumed its former rhythm. In
its intricacies Sylvia was for a time lost.

Sometime later Lambert drifted in. George saw him dancing with Betty. He
also found Sylvia. He managed to direct his partner close to her a
number of times. She must have seen him, but her eyes did not waver or
her colour heighten. He wouldn't ask for an introduction. There was no
point. His imagination pictured a number of probable disasters. If he
should ask her to dance would she recognize him, and laugh, and demand,
so that people could hear, how he had forced a way into this place?

George relinquished his partner to a man who cut in. From a harbour
close to the wall he watched Sylvia, willing himself to the point of
action.

"I will make her know me before I leave this dance," he said to himself.

Dalrymple had her now. His weak face was too flushed. He was more than
ever in people's way. George caught the distress in Sylvia's manner. He
remembered Wandel's advice, what Betty had asked him to do for her. He
dodged, without further reflection, across the floor, and held out his
hand.

"If I may----"

Without looking at him she accepted his hand, and they glided off, while
Dalrymple stared angrily. George scarcely noticed. There was room in his
mind for no more than this amazing and intoxicating experience. She was
so close that he could have bent his head and placed his lips on her
dark hair--closer than she had been that unforgettable day. The
experience was worthless unless she knew who he was.

"She must know," he thought.

If she did, why did she hide her knowledge behind an unfathomable
masquerade?

"That was kind of you," he heard her say. "Poor Dolly!"

She glanced up. Interrogation entered her eyes.

"I can't seem to remember----"

"I came from Princeton with Dick Goodhue," he explained. "It seemed such
a simple thing. Shouldn't I have cut in?"

He looked straight at her now. His heart seemed to stop. She had to be
made to remember.

"My name is George Morton."

She smiled.

"I've heard Betty talk of you. You're a great football player. It was
very kind. Of course it's all right."

But it wasn't. The touch of her hand became unbearable to George because
she didn't remember. He had to make her remember.

They were near the entrance. He paused and drew her apart from the
circling dancers.

"Would you mind losing a little of this?" he asked, trying to keep his
voice steady. "It may seem queer, but I have something to tell you that
you ought to know."

She studied him, surprised and curious.

"I can't imagine----" she began. "What is it?"

It was only a step through the door and to an alcove with a red plush
bench. The light was soft there. No one was close enough to hear. She
sat down, laughing.

"Don't keep me in suspense."

He, too, sat down. He spoke deliberately.

"The last two times I've seen you you wouldn't remember me. Even now,
when I've told you my name, you won't."

Her surprise increased.

"It's about you! But I said Betty had----Who are you?"

He bent closer.

"If I didn't tell you you might remember later. Anyway, I wouldn't want
to fight a person whose eyes were closed."

Her lips half parted. She appeared a trifle frightened. She made a
movement as if to rise.

"Just a minute," he said, harshly.

He called on the hatred that had increased during the hours of his
mental and physical slavery, a hatred to be appeased only through his
complete mastery of her.

"It won't take much to remind you," he hurried on. "Although you talk to
me as if I were a man now, last summer I was a beast because I had the
nerve to touch you when you were thrown from your horse."

She stood up quickly, reaching out for the alcove curtain. Her contralto
voice was uneven.

"Stop! You shouldn't have said that. You shouldn't have told me."

All at once she straightened, her cheeks flaming. She started for the
ballroom. He sprang after her, whispering over her shoulder:

"Now we can start fair."

She turned and faced him.

"I don't know how you got here, but you ask for a fight, Mr. Morton----"

He smiled.

"I am Mr. Morton now. I'm getting on."

Then he knew again that sickening sensation of treacherous ground eager
to swallow him.

"Are you going to run and tell them," he asked, softly, "as you did your
father last summer?"

She crossed the threshold of the ballroom. He watched her while she
hesitated for a moment, seeking feverishly someone in the brilliant,
complacent crowd.


XVI

George watched Sylvia, fighting his instinct to call out a command that
she should keep secret forever what he had told her. It was intolerable
to stand helpless, to realize that on her sudden decision his future
depended. Did she seek her mother, or Lambert, who would understand
everything at the first word? Nevertheless, he preferred she should go
to Lambert, because he could forecast too easily the alternative--Mrs.
Planter's emotionless summoning of Betty and her mother; perhaps of
Goodhue or Wandel or Dalrymple; the brutal advertisement of just what he
was to all the people he knew, to all the people he wanted to know. That
might mean the close of Betty's friendliness, the destruction of the
fine confidence that had developed between him and Goodhue, a violent
reorganization of all his plans. He gathered strength from a warm
realization that with Squibs and Mrs. Squibs Sylvia couldn't possibly
hurt him.

He became ashamed of his misgivings, aware that for nothing in the
world, even if he had the power, would he rearrange the last five
minutes.

He saw her brilliant figure start forward and take an uneven course
around the edge of the room until a man caught her and swung her out
among the dancers. George turned away. He was sorry it was Wandel who
had interfered, but that would give her time to reflect; and even if she
blurted it out to Wandel, the little man might be decent enough to
advise her to keep quiet.

George wandered restlessly across the hall to the smoking-room. How long
would the music lilt on, imprisoning Sylvia in the grasp of Wandel or
another man?

He asked for a glass of water, and took it to a lounge in front of the
fire. Here he sat, listening to the rollicking music, to the softer
harmonies of feminine voices that seemed to define for him compelling
and pleasurable vistas down which he might no longer glance. When the
silence came Sylvia would go to her mother or Lambert.

"My very dear--George."

Lambert himself bent over the back of the lounge. George guessed the
other had seen him enter and had followed. All the better, even if he
had come to attack. George had things to say to Lambert, too; so he
glanced about the room and was grateful that, except for the servants,
it held only some elderly men he had never seen before, who sat at a
distance, gossiping and laughing.

"Where," Lambert asked, "will I run into you next?"

"Anywhere," George said. "Whenever we're both invited to the same place.
I didn't come without being asked, so my being here isn't funny."

Lambert walked around and sat down. All the irony had left his face. He
had an air of doubtful disapproval.

"Maybe not funny," he said, "but--odd."

George stirred. How long would the music and the laughter continue to
drift in?

"Why?"

"You've travelled a long way," Lambert mused. "I wonder if in football
clothes men don't look too much of a pattern. I wonder if you haven't
let yourself be carried a little too far."

"Why?" George asked again.

"Princeton and football," Lambert went on, "are well enough in their
way; but when you come to a place like this and dance with those girls
who don't know, it seems scarcely fair. Of course, if they knew, and
wanted you still--that's the whole point."

"They wouldn't," George admitted, "but why should they matter if the
people that count know?"

Lambert glanced at him. Was the music's quicker measure prophetic of the
end?

"What do you mean?" Lambert asked.

"What you said last fall has worried me," George answered. "That's the
reason I came here--so that your sister would know me from Adam. She
does, and she can do what she pleases about it. It's in her hands now."

Lambert reddened.

"You've the nerve of the devil," he said, angrily. "You had no business
to speak to my sister. The whole thing had been forgotten."

George shook his head.

"You hadn't forgotten it. She told me that day that I shouldn't forget.
I hadn't forgotten it. I never will."

"I can't talk about it," Lambert said.

He looked squarely at George.

"Here's what puts your being here out of shape: You're ashamed of what
you were. Aren't you?"

"I've always thought," George said, "you were man enough to realize it's
only what I am and may become that counts. I wouldn't say ashamed. I'm
sorry, because it makes what I'm doing just that much harder; because
you, for instance, know about it, and might cause trouble."

Lambert made no difficulty about the implied question.

"I don't want to risk causing trouble for any one unjustly. It's up to
you not to make me. But don't bother my sister again."

"Let me get far enough," George said, "and you won't be able to make
trouble--you, or your sister, or your father."

Lambert grinned, the doubt leaving his face as if he had reached a
decision.

"I wouldn't bank on father. I'd keep out of his sight."

The advice placed him, for the present, on the safe side. Sylvia's
decision remained, and just then the music crashed into a silence,
broken by exigent applause. George got up, thrusting his hands in his
pockets. The orchestra surrendered to the applause, but was Sylvia
dancing now?

Voices drifted in from the hall, one high and obdurate; others better
controlled, but persistent in argument. Lambert grimaced. George
sneered.

"But that's all right, because he didn't have to work for his living."

"If you don't come a cropper," Lambert said, "you'll get fed up with
that sort of thinking. Dolly's young."

Dalrymple was the first in the room, flushed, a trifle uneven in his
movements. Goodhue and Wandel followed. Goodhue smiled in a pained,
surprised way. Wandel's precise features expressed nothing.

"Why not dancing, Lambert, old Eli?" Dalrymple called jovially. "Haul
these gospel sharks off----Waiter! I say, waiter! Something bubbly, dry,
and nineteen hundred, if they're doing us that well."

The others didn't protest. They seemed to arrange themselves as a
friendly screen between Dalrymple and the elderly men. George didn't
care to talk to Dalrymple in that condition--there was too much that
Dalrymple had always wanted to say and hadn't. He started for the door,
but Wandel caught his arm.

"Wait around, very strong person," he whispered. "Dolly doesn't know it,
but he's leaving in a minute."

George shook his head, and started on. Dalrymple glanced up.

"Morton!" he said.

Goodhue took the glass from the waiter, but Dalrymple, grinning a shamed
sort of triumph and comprehension, reached out for it and sipped.

"Not bad. Great dancer, Morton. Around the end, and through the centre,
and all that----"

"Keep quiet," Goodhue warned him.

George knew that the other wouldn't. He shrank from the breaking of the
sullen truce between them. Dalrymple glanced at his cuffs, spilling a
little of the wine.

"Damned sight more useful to stick to your laundry--it's none too good."

Quite distinctly George caught Lambert's startled change of countenance
and his quick movement forward, Goodhue's angry flush, Wandel's apparent
unconcern. In that moment he measured his advance, understood all he had
got from Squibs and books, from Betty, from Goodhue, from Princeton;
but, although he easily conquered his first impulse to strike, his rage
glowed the hotter because it was confined. As he passed close he heard
Lambert whisper:

"Good man!"

But even then Wandel wouldn't let him go, and the music had stopped
again, and only the undefinable shadows of women's voices reached him.
He tried to shake off Wandel who had followed him to the hall. He
couldn't wait. He had to enter that moving, chattering crowd to find out
what Sylvia had decided.

"Go downstairs, great man," Wandel was whispering, "get a cab, and wait
in it at the door, so that you will be handy when I bring the infant
Bacchus out."

"I'd rather not," George said, impatiently. "Someone else will do."

"By no means. Expediency, my dear friend, and the general welfare.
Hercules for little Bacchus."

He couldn't refuse. Wandel and Goodhue, and, for that matter all of
Dalrymple's friends, those girls in there, depended on him; yet he knew
it was a bad business for him and for Dalrymple; and he wanted above all
other things to pass for a moment through that brilliant screen that
moved perpetually between him and Sylvia.

He waited in the shadows of the cab until Dalrymple and Wandel left the
building. Wandel motioned the other into the cab. Dalrymple obeyed,
willingly enough, swinging his stick, and humming off the key. Probably
Wandel's diplomacy. Wandel jumped in, called an address to the driver,
and slammed the door.

"Where are you taking him?" George asked.

For the first time Dalrymple seemed to realize who the silent man in the
shadows was.

"I'm not going on any party with Morton," he said, sullenly.

"You can go to the devil," Wandel said, pleasantly, "as long as you keep
away from decent people until you're decent yourself."

"No," George said. "He's going home or I have nothing more to do with
it."

"Perhaps you're right," Wandel agreed, "but you can fancy I had to offer
him something better than that to get him out."

He tapped on the pane and gave the driver the new address. Dalrymple
started to rise.

"Won't go home--you keep your dirty hands off me, Morton. You----"

"Hercules!" softly from Wandel.

George grasped Dalrymple's arms, pulled him down, held him as in a
vise. Dalrymple raved. Wandel laughed pleasantly.

"Dirty hands," flashed through George's brain. Did Dalrymple know
anything, or was it an instinctive suspicion, or merely the explosion of
helpless temper and dislike?

The ride was brief, and the block in which Dalrymple lived was,
fortunately, at that moment free of pedestrians. Wandel descended and
rang the bell. When the door was opened George relaxed his grasp.
Dalrymple tried to spring from the opposite side of the cab. George
caught him, lifted him, carried him like a child across the sidewalk,
and set him down in the twilight of a hall where a flunky gaped.

"There's your precious friend," he accused Wandel.

He returned to the cab, rubbing his hands as if they needed cleansing.

"There's no one like you, great man," Wandel said when he had come back
to the cab. "You've done Dolly and everyone he would have seen to-night
a good turn."

But George felt he had done himself a bad one. During the rest of his
time at Princeton, and afterward in New York, he would have a dangerous
enemy. Dirty hands! Trust Dalrymple to do his best to give that
qualification its real meaning. And these people! You could trust them,
too, to stand by Dalrymple against the man who had done them a good
turn. It had been rotten of Wandel to ask it, to take him away at that
vital moment. Anyway, it was done. He forgot Dalrymple in his present
anxiety. The ride seemed endless. The ascent in the elevator was a
unique torture. The cloak-room attendants had an air of utter
indifference. When he could, George plunged into the ballroom, escaping
Wandel, threading the hurrying maze to the other end of the room where
earlier in the evening he had seen Sylvia's mother sitting with Mrs.
Alston. George passed close, every muscle taut. Mrs. Planter gave no
sign. Mrs. Alston reached over and tapped his arm with her fan. He
paused, holding his breath.

"Betty asked me to look for you," she said. "Where have you been? She
was afraid you had found her party tiresome. You haven't been dancing
much."

He answered her politely, and walked on. He braced himself against the
wall, the strain completely broken. She hadn't told. She hadn't demanded
that her mother take her home. She hadn't said: "Betty, what kind of men
do you ask to your dances?" Why hadn't she? Again he saw his big,
well-clothed figure in a glass, and he smiled. Was it because he was
already transformed?

Here she came, dancing with Goodhue, and Goodhue seemed trying to lead
her close. George didn't understand at first that he silently asked for
news of Dalrymple. His own eyes studied Sylvia. Her face held too much
colour. She gave him back his challenge, but the contempt in her eyes
broadened his smile. He managed a reassuring nod to Goodhue, but
Dalrymple, for the time, was of no importance. Sylvia was going to
fight, and not like a spoiled child. He must have impressed her as being
worthy of a real fight.

He faced the rest of the evening with new confidence. He forgot to be
over-careful with these people whose actions were unstudied. He dodged
across the floor and took Betty from Lambert Planter while Lambert
raised his eyebrows, relinquished her with pronounced reluctance, and
watched George guide her swiftly away. Maybe Lambert was right, and he
ought to tell Betty, but not now. To-night, against all his
expectations, he found himself having a good time, enjoying more than
anything else this intimate and exhilarating progress with Betty. Always
he hated to give her up, but he danced with other girls, and found they
liked to dance with him because he was big, and danced well, and was
Dicky Goodhue's friend and Betty's, and played football; but, since he
couldn't very well ask Sylvia, he only really cared to dance with Betty.

He was at Betty's table for supper. He didn't like to hear these pretty
girls laughing about Dalrymple, but then with them Dalrymple must have
exercised a good deal of restraint. It ought to be possible to make them
see the ugly side, to bare the man's instinct to go from this party to
another. Then they wouldn't laugh.

Lambert sat down for awhile.

"Where's Sylvia?" Betty asked.

Lambert shrugged his shoulders.

"It's hard enough to keep track of you, Betty. Sylvia's a sister."

George gathered that Sylvia's absence from that table had impressed them
both. He knew very well where she was, across the room, focus for as
large a gathering as Betty's, chiefly of young men, eager for her
brilliancy. Lambert went on, glancing at George his questions of the
smoking-room.

It wasn't long before the dawn when George said polite things with
Goodhue and Wandel, and after their pattern. In the lower hall he
noticed that all these pleasure seekers, a while ago flushed and happy,
had undergone a devastating change. Faces were white. Gowns looked
rumpled and old. The laughter and chatter were no longer impulsive.

"The way one feels after a hard game," he thought.

Goodhue offered to take Wandel in and drop him. The little man alone
seemed as fresh and neat as at the start of the evening.

"Had a good time, great person?" he asked as they drove off. "But then
why shouldn't great men always have good times?"

Wandel's manner suggested that he had seen to George's good time. What
he had actually done was to involve him in an open hostility with
Dalrymple. The others didn't mention that youth. Was there a tactful
thought for him in their restraint?

They left Wandel at an expensive bachelor apartment house overlooking
the park. George gathered from Goodhue, as they drove on, that Wandel's
attitude toward his family was that of an old and confidential friend.

"You see Driggs always has to be his own master," he said.


XVII

Because of the restless contrast of that trip George brought back to
Princeton a new appreciation; yet beneath the outer beauty there, he
knew, a man's desires and ambitions lost none of their ugliness. He
stared at Sylvia's portrait, but it made him want the living body that
he had touched, that was going to give him a decent fight. Already he
planned for other opportunities to meet her, although with her attitude
what it was he didn't see how he could use them to advance his cause;
and always there was the possibility of her resenting his persistence to
the point of changing her mind about telling.

He had decided to avoid Dalrymple as far as possible, but that first
night, as he drowsed over a book, he heard a knock at his door, not
loud, and suggestive of reluctance and indecision. He hid the photograph
and the riding crop, and called:

"Come in!"

The door opened slowly. Dalrymple stood on the threshold, his weak face
white and perverse. George waited, watching him conquer a bitter
disinclination. He knew what was coming and how much worse it would make
matters between them.

"It seems," the tortured man said, "that I was beastly rude to you last
night. I've come to say I didn't mean it and am sorry."

"You've come," George said, quietly, "because Goodhue and Wandel have
made you, through threats, I daresay. If you hadn't meant it you
wouldn't have been rude in just that way. I'm grateful to Goodhue and
Wandel, but I won't have your apologies, because they don't mean a damn
thing."

Dalrymple's face became evil. He started to back out.

"Wait a minute," George commanded. "You don't like me because I'm
working my way through college. That's what you shot at me last night
when you'd drunk enough to give you the nerve, but it's been in your
mind all along. I'd pound a little common-sense and decency into you,
only I wouldn't feel clean after doing it."

That, to an extent, broke down his severity. It sounded queer, from him.
If Lambert Planter could have heard him say that!

"Let the others think they've done us a good turn," he went on. "We have
to live in the same class without clawing each other's faces every time
we meet, but you can't pull the wool over my eyes, and I won't try to
pull it over yours. Now get out, and don't come here alone again."

He felt better and cleaner after that. When Dalrymple had gone he
finished his chapter and tumbled into bed.


XVIII

George was glad of the laundry, indeed, as the holidays approached. It
gave him a sound excuse for not dashing joyously from Princeton with the
rest, but it didn't cure the depression with which he saw the college
empty. He wandered about a campus as deserted as a city swept by
pestilence, asking himself what he would have done if his father and
mother hadn't exiled him as thoroughly as Old Planter had. There was no
point thinking about that; it wasn't even a question. He took long walks
or stayed in his room, reading, and once or twice answering regretfully
invitations that had sprung from encounters at Betty's party. It was
nice to have them, but of course he couldn't go to such affairs alone
just yet. Besides, he didn't have the money.

Squibs Bailly limped all the way up his stairs one day, scolding him for
sulking in his tent.

"I only heard last night that you were in town. I'm not psychic. Why
haven't you been around?"

"I didn't want to bother----"

Bailly interrupted him.

"I'm afraid I didn't appreciate you went quite so much alone."

"Altogether alone," George said. "But I don't want anybody to feel sorry
for me because of that. It has some advantages."

"You're too young to say such things," Bailly said.

He made George go to the Dickinson Street house for Christmas dinner.
There was no other guest. The rooms were bright with holly, and a very
small but dazzling Christmas tree stood in a corner, bearing a gift for
him. Mrs. Bailly, as he entered, touched his cheek with her lips and
welcomed him by his first name. She created for him an illusion that
made him choke a trifle. She made him feel as if he had come home.

"And," he thought, "Squibs and she know."

He wondered if it was that knowledge that made Squibs go into his social
views one evening when he sat with him in the study. It was then that
George realized he had no such views apart from his own case. Vaguely he
knew that somewhere outside of Princeton strikes multiplied these days,
that poor people complained of the cost of food and housing, that
communistic propaganda was talked with an increasing freedom, that now
and then a bomb burst, destroying more often than not the people it was
designed to help. He saw that Squibs sought to interest him, and he gave
a close attention while the tutor elaborated his slight knowledge of the
growing unrest.

"But it's all so far away, sir," he said. "I've so much of more
importance to me to bother about right here."

Bailly relighted his pipe.

"The happy, limited vision of youth!" he sighed. "You'll be through your
a, b, c's before you know it. Are you going to face such big issues
without any forethought?"

He smoked for a few moments, then commenced to speak doubtfully.

"And in another sense it isn't as far away as you think. It all goes on
_in petto_, right here in undergraduate Princeton. The views a man takes
away from college should be applicable to the conditions he meets
outside."

"I don't quite see what you mean, sir."

Why was Bailly going at it so carefully?

"I mean," Bailly said, "that here you have your poor men, your earnest
men, and your lords of the land. I mean there is no real community of
interest here. I mean you've made friends because you're bigger and
better looking than most, and play football like a demon. You haven't
made any friends simply because you are poor and earnest. And the poor
students suffer from the cost of things, and the rich men don't know and
don't care. And the poor men, and the men without family or a good
school behind them, who haven't football or some outstanding
usefulness, are as submerged as the workers in a mine. Prospect Street
is Fifth Avenue or Park Lane, and the men who can't get in the clubs,
because of poverty or lack of prominence, remind me of the ragged ones
who cling to the railings, peering through at plenty with evil in their
hearts."

"You're advocating communism, sir?"

Bailly shook his head.

"I'm advocating nothing. I'm trying to find out what you advocate."

"I can't help feeling," George said, stubbornly, "that a man has to look
after himself."

And as he walked home he confessed freely enough in his own mind:

"I'm advocating George Morton. How can Squibs expect me to bother with
any one else when I have so far to go?"


XIX

He thrust Squibs' uncomfortable prods from his brain. He applied himself
to his books--useful books. Education and culture were more important to
him than the physical reactions of overworked labour or the mental
processes of men who advocated violence. Such distracting questions,
however, were uncomfortably in the air. Allen, one of the poor men
against whom the careful Rogers had warned him long ago, called on him
one cold night. The manner of his address made George wonder if Squibs
had been talking to him, too.

"Would like a few minutes' chat, Morton. No one worth while's in
Princeton. It won't queer you to have me in your room."

No, George decided. That was an opening one might expect from Allen. The
man projected an appreciable power from his big, bony figure; his
angular face. George had heard vaguely that he had worked in a factory,
preparing himself for college. He knew from his own observation that
Allen wasn't above waiting at commons, and he had seen the lesser men
turn to him as a leader.

"Sit down," George said, "and don't talk like an ass. You can't queer
me. What do you want me to do--offer to walk to classes with my arm over
your shoulder? There's too much of that sensitive talk going around."

"You're a plain speaker," Allen said. "So am I. You'll admit you've seen
a lot more of the pretty crowd than you have of me and my friends. I
thought it might be useful to ask you why."

"Because," George answered, "I'm in college to get everything I can. You
and your crowd don't happen to have the stuff I want."

Allen fingered a book nervously.

"I came," he said, "to see if I couldn't persuade you that we have."

"I'm listening," George said, indifferently.

"Right on the table!" Allen answered, quickly. "You're the biggest poor
man in the class. You're logically the poor men's Moses. They admire
you. You've always been talked of in terms of the varsity. Everybody
knows you're Princeton's best football player. The poor men would do
anything for you. What will you do for them?"

"I won't have you split the class that way," George cried.

"Every class," Allen said, "is split along that line, only this class is
going to let the split be seen. You work your way through college, but
you run with a rich crowd, led by the hand of Driggs Wandel."

So even Allen had noticed that and had become curious.

"Wandel," Allen went on, "will use you to hurt us--the poor men; and
when he's had what he wants of you he'll send you back to the muck
heap."

George shook his head, smiling.

"No, because you've said yourself that whatever power I have comes from
football and not from an empty pocket-book."

"Use all the power you have," Allen urged. "Come in with us. Help the
poor men, and we'll know how to reward you."

"You're already thinking of Sophomore elections?" George asked. "I don't
care particularly for office."

Allen's face reddened with anger.

"I'm thinking of the clubs first. What I said when I came in is true.
The selfish men intriguing for Prospect Street don't dare be friendly
with the poor men; afraid it might hurt their chances to be seen with a
poler. By God, that's vicious! It denies us the companionship we've come
to college to find. We want all the help we can get here. The clubs are
a hideous hindrance. Promise me you'll keep away from the clubs."

George laughed.

"I haven't made up my mind about the clubs," he said. "They have bad
features, but there's good in them. The club Goodhue joins will be the
best club of our time in college. Suppose you knew you could get an
election to that; would you turn it down?"

The angular face became momentarily distorted.

"I won't consider an impossible situation. Anyway, I couldn't afford it.
That's another bad feature. If you want, I'll say no, a thousand times
no."

"I wouldn't trust you," George laughed, "but you know you haven't a
chance. So you want to smash the thing you can't get in. I call _that_
vicious. And let me tell you, Allen. You may reform things out of
existence, but you can't destroy them with a bomb. Squibs Bailly will
tell you that."

"You think you'll make a good club," Allen said.

"I'll tell you what I think," George answered, quite unruffled, "when I
make up my mind to stand for or against the clubs. Squibs says half the
evils in the world come from precipitancy. You're precipitate. Thrash it
out carefully, as I'm doing."

He wondered if he had convinced Allen, knowing very well that his own
attitude would be determined by the outcome of the chance he had to
enter Goodhue's club.

"We've got to make up our minds now," Allen said. "Promise me that
you'll keep out of the clubs and I'll make you the leader of the class.
You're in a position to bring the poor men to the top for once."

George didn't want to break with Allen. The man did control a large
section of the class, so he sent him away amicably enough, merely
repeating that he hadn't made up his mind; and ending with:

"But I won't be controlled by any faction."

Allen left, threatening to talk with him again.

George didn't sleep well that night. Squibs and Allen had made him
uncomfortable. Finally he cleared his mind with the reflection that his
private attitude was determined. No matter whom it hurt he was going to
be one of the fortunates with a whip in his hand; but he, above most
people, could understand the impulses of men like Allen, and the
restless ones in the world, who didn't hold a whip, and so desired
feverishly to spring.


XX

The cold weather placed a smooth black floor on Lake Carnegie. George
went down one evening with the Baillys. They brought Betty Alston, who
was just home from New York and had dined with them. A round moon smiled
above the row of solemn and vigilant poplars along the canal bank. The
shadows of the trees made you catch your breath as if on the edge of
perilous pitfalls.

Going down through the woods they passed Allen. Even in that
yellow-splashed darkness George recognized the bony figure.

"Been skating?" he called.

"Hello, Morton! No, I don't skate."

"Then," George laughed, "why don't you smash the ice?"

Allen laughed back mirthlessly, but didn't answer; and, as they went on,
Betty wanted to know what it was all about. George told her of Allen's
visit.

"But congenial people," she said, "will always gather together. It would
be dreadful to have one's friends arbitrarily chosen. You'll go to a
club with your friends."

"But Allen says the poor men can't afford it," he answered. "I'm one of
the poor men."

"You'll always find a way to do what you want," she said, confidently.

But when they were on the lake the question of affording the things one
wanted slipped between them again.

George had a fancy that Mrs. Bailly guided her awkward husband away from
Betty and him. Why? At least it was pleasant to be alone with Betty,
gliding along near the bank, sometimes clasping hands at a half-seen,
doubtful stretch. Betty spoke of it.

"Where are my guardians?"

"Let's go a little farther," he urged. "We'll find them easily enough."

It didn't worry her much.

"Why did you come back so soon?" she asked.

He hesitated. He had hoped to avoid such questions.

"I haven't been away."

She glanced up, surprised.

"You mean you've been in Princeton through the holiday?"

"Yes, I feel I ought to go easy with what little I have."

"I knew you were working your way through," she said, "but I never
guessed it meant as much denial as that."

"Don't worry," he laughed, "I'll make money next summer."

"I wish I'd known. And none of your friends thought!"

"Why should they? They're mostly too rich."

"That's wrong."

"Are you driving me into Allen's camp?" he asked. "You can't; for I
expect to be rich myself, some day. Any man can, if he goes about it in
the right way. Maybe Allen doubts his power, and that's the reason he's
against money and the pleasant things it buys. Does it make any
difference to you, my being poor for a time?"

"Why should it?" she asked, warmly.

"Allen," he said, "couldn't understand your skating with me."

Why not tell Betty the rest in this frozen and romantic solitude they
shared? He decided not. He had risked enough for the present. When she
turned around he didn't try to hold her, skating swiftly back at her
side, aware of a danger in such solitude; charging himself with a
scarcely definable disloyalty to his conception of Sylvia.


XXI

He fancied Betty desired to make up for her thoughtlessness during the
holidays when she asked him for dinner on a Saturday night. With that
dinner, no matter what others might think of his lack of money and
background, she had put herself on record, for it was a large, formal
party sprinkled with people from New York, and drawing from the
University only the kind of men Allen was out to fight. Wandel, George
thought, rather disapproved of his being there, but as a result, he made
two trips to parties in New York during the winter. Both were failures,
for he didn't meet Sylvia, yet he heard of her always as a dazzling
success.

He answered Dalrymple's cold politeness with an irritating indifference.
In the spring, however, he detected a radical alteration in Dalrymple's
manner.

By that time, the scheme discussed carelessly at the Alstons' in the
fall had been worked out. On good afternoons, when their work allowed, a
few men, all friends of the Alstons, drove out, and, with passable
ponies, played practice matches at polo on the field Mr. Alston had had
arranged. The neighbours fell into a habit of concentrating there, and
George was thrown into intimate contact with them, seeing other gates
open rather eagerly before him, for he hadn't miscalculated his ability
to impress with horses. When Mr. Alston had first asked him he had
accepted gladly. Because of his long habit in the saddle and his
accuracy of eye he played better from the start than these other
novices. As in football, he teamed well with Goodhue.

"Goodhue to Morton," Wandel complained, "or Morton to Goodhue. What
chance has a mere duffer like me against such a very distinguished
combination?"

It was during these games that Goodhue fell into the practice of
shouting George's first name across the field, and when George became
convinced that such familiarity was not chance, but an expression of a
deepening friendship, he responded unaffectedly. It was inevitable the
others should adopt Goodhue's example. Even Dalrymple did, and George
asked himself why the man was trying to appear friendly, for he knew
that in his heart Dalrymple had not altered.

It filled George with a warm and formless pleasure to hear Betty using
his Christian name, to realize that a precedent had this time been
established; yet it required an effort, filled him with a great
confusion, to call her familiarly "Betty" for the first time.

He chatted with her at the edge of the field while grooms led the ponies
up and down.

"What are your plans for the summer?" she asked.

"I don't quite know what will happen."

"We," she said, "will be in Maine. Can't you run up in August? Dicky
Goodhue's coming then."

He looked at her. He tried to hide his hunger for the companionship, the
relaxation such a visit would give. He glanced away.

"I wish I could. Have you forgotten I'm to make money? I've got to try
to do that this summer, Betty."

There, it was out. Colour stole into her white cheeks.

"I'm sorry," she said.

He had another reason for refusing. He was growing afraid of Betty. He
was conscious of an increasing effort to drive her memory from the
little room where Sylvia's portrait watched. It was, he told himself,
because he didn't see Sylvia oftener, couldn't feel his heart respond to
the exciting enmity in her brilliant eyes.

Goodhue and Dalrymple, it developed, were parting, amicably enough as
far as any one knew.

"Dolly thinks he'll room alone next year," was Goodhue's explanation.
Dalrymple explained nothing.

Driving back to town one afternoon Goodhue proposed to George that he
replace Dalrymple.

"Campus rooms," he said, "aren't as expensive as most in town."

He mentioned a figure. George thought rapidly. What an opportunity! And
aside from what Goodhue could do for him, he was genuinely fond of the
man. George craved absolute independence, and he knew Goodhue would give
him all of that he asked for.

"I'd like to," he said.

Goodhue smiled.

"That's splendid. I think we'll manage together."

Wandel frowned at the news. So did Allen. Allen came frequently now to
talk his college socialism. George listened patiently, always answering:

"I've made up my mind to nothing, except that I'll take my friends where
I find them, high or low. But I'm not against you, Allen."

Yet George was uneasy, knowing the moment for making up his mind
wouldn't be long delayed. He understood very well that already some men
knew to what club they'd go more than a year later. Secretly, perhaps
illegally, the sections for the clubs were forming in his class. Small
groups were quietly organizing under the guidance of the upper classes.
During Sophomore year these small groups would elect other men to the
limit of full membership. It was perfectly clear that unless he went in
ahead of Dalrymple his chances of making the club he wanted were
worthless. As a result of his talks with Allen, moreover, he felt that
Wandel didn't want him. If Wandel could persuade Goodhue that George
could serve the interests of the fortunates best from the outside the
issue would be settled.

"But I won't be used that way," George decided. "I'm out for myself."

Along that straight line he had made his plans for the summer. Somehow
he was going to study the methods of the greatest financial market in
the country, so that later he could apply them serviceably to his own
fortune. Bailly had other ideas. One night while they lounged on the
front campus listening to senior singing the long tutor suggested that
he take up some form of manual labour.

"It would keep you in good condition," he said, "and it might broaden
your vision by disclosing the aims and the dissatisfactions of those who
live by the sweat of their brows."

George frowned.

"I know enough of that already. I've been a labourer myself. I haven't
the time, sir."

Bailly probably knew that he was dealing with a point of view far more
determined and mature than that of the average undergraduate. He didn't
argue, but George felt the need of an apology.

"I've got to learn how to make money," he said.

"Money isn't everything," Bailly sighed.

"I've started after certain things," George justified himself. "Money's
one of them. I'll work for next to nothing this summer if I have to.
I'll be a runner, the man who sweeps out the office, anything that will
give me a chance to watch and study Wall Street. I'm sorry if you don't
approve, sir."

"I didn't say that," Bailly answered, "but the fact was sufficiently
clear."

Yet George knew perfectly well a few days later that it was Bailly who
had spoken about his ambition to Mr. Alston.

"Blodgett, I fancy," Mr. Alston said, "will offer you some small start."

He handed George a letter addressed to one Josiah Blodgett, of the firm
of Blodgett and Sinclair.

"Good luck, and good-bye until next fall."

"If you do change your mind----If you can manage it----" Betty said.

So George, two or three days before commencement, left Princeton for
Wall Street, and presented his letter.

The offices of Blodgett and Sinclair were gorgeous and extensive, raw
with marble, and shining with mahogany. They suggested a hotel in bad
taste rather than a factory that turned out money in spectacular
quantities.

"Mr. Blodgett will see you," a young man announced in an awed voice, as
if such condescension were infrequent.

In the remote room where Blodgett lurked the scheme of furnishing
appeared to culminate. The man himself shared its ornamental grossness.
He glanced up, his bald head puckering half its height. George saw that
although he was scarcely middle-aged Blodgett was altogether too fat,
with puffy, unhealthily coloured cheeks. In such a face the tiny eyes
had an appearance nearly porcine. The man's clothing would have put an
habitue of the betting ring at ease--gray-and-white checks,
dove-coloured spats, a scarlet necktie. Pudgy fingers twisted Mr.
Alston's letter. The little eyes opened wider. The frown relaxed. A bass
voice issued from the broad mouth:

"If you've come here to learn, you can't expect a million dollars a
week. Say fifteen to start."

George didn't realize how extraordinarily generous that was. He only
decided he could scrape along on it.

"Mr. Alston," the deep voice went on, "tells me you're a great football
player. That's a handicap. All you can tackle here is trouble, and the
only kicking we have is when Mundy boots somebody out of a job. He's my
office manager. Report to him. Wait a minute. I'd give a ping-pong
player a job if Mr. Alston asked me to. He's a fine man. But then I'm
through. It's up to the man and Mundy. If the man's no good Mundy
doesn't even bother to tell me, and it's twenty stories to the street."

George started to thank him, but already the rotund figure was pressed
against the desk, and the tiny eyes absorbed in important-looking
papers.

Mundy, George decided, wasn't such an ogre after all. He wore glasses.
He was bald, thin, and stoop-shouldered. He had the benign expression of
a parson; but behind that bald forehead, George soon learned, was stored
all the knowledge he craved, without, however, the imagination to make
it personally very valuable.

If he didn't sweep the office at first, George approximated such labour,
straightening the desks of the mighty, checking up on the contents of
waste-paper baskets, seeing that the proper people got mail and
newspapers, running errands; and always, in the office or outside, he
kept his ears open and his eyes wide. He absorbed the patter of the
Street. He learned to separate men into classes, the wise ones, who
always made money, and the foolish, who now and then had good luck, but
most of the time were settling their losses. And at every opportunity he
was after what Mundy concealed behind his appearance of a parson.

At night he dissected the financial journals, watching the alterations
in the market, and probing for the causes; applying to this novitiate
the same grim determination he had brought to Squibs Bailly's lessons a
year before. Never once was he tempted to seek a simple path to fortune.

"When I speculate," he told himself, "there'll be mighty little risk
about it."

Even in those days his fifteen dollars a week condemned him to a cheap
lodging house near Lexington Avenue, the simplest of meals, and
practically no relaxation. He exercised each morning, and walked each
evening home from the office, for he hadn't forgotten what Princeton
expected from him in the fall.

Sylvia's photograph and the broken riding crop supervised his labours,
but he knew he couldn't hope, except by chance, to see her this summer.

One Saturday morning Goodhue came unexpectedly into the office and
carried him off to Long Island. George saw the tiny eyes of Blodgett
narrow.

Blodgett, perhaps because of Mr. Alston's letter, had condescended to
chat with George a number of times in the outer office. On the Monday
following he strolled up and jerked out:

"Wasn't that young Richard Goodhue I saw you going off with Saturday?"

"Yes sir."

"Know him well?"

"Very. We're in the same class. We're rooming together next year."

Blodgett grunted and walked on, mopping his puffy face with a shiny blue
handkerchief. George wondered if he had displeased Blodgett by going
with Goodhue. He decided he hadn't, for the picturesquely dressed man
stopped oftener after that, chatting quite familiarly.

Whatever one thought of Blodgett's appearance and manner, one admired
him. George hadn't been in the Street a week before he realized that the
house of Blodgett and Sinclair was one of the most powerful in America,
with numerous ramifications to foreign countries. There was no phase of
finance it didn't touch; and, as far as George could see, it was all
Josiah Blodgett, who had come to New York from the West, by way of
Chicago. In those offices Sinclair was scarcely more than a name in gold
on various doors. Once or twice, during the summer, indeed, George saw
the partner chatting in a bored way with Blodgett. His voice was high
and affected, like Wandel's, and he had a house in Newport. According to
office gossip he had little money interest in the firm, lending the
prestige of his name for what Blodgett thought it was worth. As he
watched the fat, hard worker chatting with the butterfly man, George
suddenly realized that Blodgett might want a house in Newport, too. Was
it because he was Richard Goodhue's room-mate that Blodgett stopped him
in the hall one day, grinning with good nature?

"If I were a cub," he puffed, "I'd buy this very morning all the Katydid
I could, and sell at eighty-nine."

George whistled.

"I knew something was due to happen to Katydid, but I didn't expect
anything like that."

"How did you know?" Blodgett demanded.

He shot questions until he had got the story of George's close
observation and night drudgery.

"Glad to see Mundy hasn't dropped you out the window yet," he grinned.
"Maybe you'll get along. Glad for Mr. Alston's sake. See here, if I were
a cub, and knew as much about Katydid as you do, I wouldn't hesitate to
borrow a few cents from the boss."

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