"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.

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 dÉbut. 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.

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 habituÉ 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."

"No," George said. "I've a very little of my own. I'll use that."

He had, perhaps, two hundred dollars in the bank at Princeton. He drew a check without hesitation and followed Blodgett's advice. He had commenced to speculate without risk. Several times after that Blodgett jerked out similar advice, usually commencing with: "What does young Pierpont Morgan think of so and so?" And usually George would give his employer a reasonable forecast. Because of these discreet hints his balance grew, and Mundy one day announced that his salary had been raised ten dollars.

All that, however, was the brighter side. Often during those hot, heavy nights, while he pieced together the day's complicated pattern, George envied the fortunates who could play away from pavements and baking walls. He found himself counting the days until he would go back to Princeton and football, and Betty's charm; but even that prospect was shadowed by his doubt as to how he would emerge from the club tangle.

He didn't meet Sylvia, but one day he saw Old Planter step from an automobile and enter the marble temple where he was accustomed to sacrifice corporations and people to the gods of his pocket-book. The great man used a heavy stick and climbed the steps rather slowly, flanked by obsequious underlings, gaped at by a crowd, buzzing and over-impressed. Somehow George couldn't fancy Blodgett with the gout—it was too delightfully bred.

He peered in the automobile, but of course Sylvia wasn't there, nor, he gathered from his mother's occasional notes to thank him for the little money he could send her, was she much at Oakmont.

"I'll see her this fall," he told himself, "and next winter. I've started to do what I said I would."

As far as Wall Street was concerned, Blodgett evidently agreed with him.

"I can put up with you next summer," he said at parting. "I'll write Mr. Alston you're fit for something besides football."

Mundy displayed a pastoral sadness.

"You ought to stay right here," he said. "College is all right if you don't want to amount to a hill of beans. It's rotten for making money."

Nevertheless, he agreed to send George a weekly letter, giving his wise views as to what was going on among the money makers. They all made him feel that even in that rushing place his exit had caused a perceptible ripple.

XXII

The smallness, the untidiness, the pure joy of Squibs Bailly's study!

The tutor ran his hands over George's muscles.

"You're looking older and a good deal worn," he said, "but thank God you're still hard."

Mrs. Bailly sat there, too. They were both anxious for his experiences, yet when he had told them everything he sensed a reservation in their praise.

"I think I should turn my share of the laundry back," he said, defiantly. "I've something like three thousand dollars of my own now."

"Does it make you feel very rich?" Mrs. Bailly asked.

He laughed.

"It's a tiny start, but I won't need half of it to get through the winter."

Bailly lighted his pipe, stretched his legs, and pondered.

"You're giving the laundry up," he said, finally, "because—because it savours of service?"

George didn't get angry. He couldn't with Squibs in the first place; and, in the second, hadn't that thought been at the bottom of his mind ever since Dalrymple's remark about dirty hands?

"I don't need it any more," he said, "and I'd like to have you dispose of it where it will do the most good."

His voice hardened.

"But to somebody who wants to climb, not to any wild-eyed fellow who thinks he sees salvation in pulling down."

"You've just returned from the world," Bailly said, "and all you've brought is three thousand dollars and a bad complexion. I wish you'd directed your steps to a coal mine. You'd have come back richer."

XXIII

Goodhue got in a few hours after George. There was a deep satisfaction in their greetings. They were glad to be together, facing varsity football, looking ahead to the pleasures and excitements of another year, but George would have been happier if he could have shared his room-mate's unconcern about the clubs. Of course, Goodhue was settled. Did he know about George? George was glad the other couldn't guess how carefully he had calculated the situation—to take the best, or a dignified stand against all clubs with Allen getting behind him with all the poor and unknown men. But wasn't that exactly Wandel's game?

Stringham and Green were glad enough to see him, but Green thought he had been thoughtless not to have kept a football in the office for kicking goals through transoms.

It was good to feel the vapours of the market-place leaving his lungs and brain. Goodhue and he, during the easy preliminary work, resumed their runs. He felt he hadn't really gone back. If he didn't get hurt he would do things that fall that would drive the perplexed frown from Bailly's forehead, that would win Betty's applause and Sylvia's admiration. Whatever happened he was going to take care of her brother in the Yale game.

Betty was rather too insistent about that. She had fallen into the habit again of stopping George and Goodhue on their runs for a moment's gossip.

"See here, Betty," Goodhue laughed once, "you're rather too interested in this Eli Planter."

George had reached the same conclusion—but why should it bother him? It was logical that Betty and Lambert should be drawn together. He blamed himself for a habit of impatience that had grown upon him. Had it come out of the strain of the Street, or was it an expression of his knowledge that now, at the commencement of his second year, he approached the culmination of his entire college course? With the club matter settled there would remain little for him save a deepening of useful friendships and a squeezing of the opportunity to acquire knowledge and a proper manner. For the same cause, the approaching election of officers for Sophomore year was of vital importance. It was generally conceded that the ticket put through now, barring accident, would be elected senior year to go out into the world at the head of the class. The presidency would graduate a man with a patent of nobility, as one might say. George guessed that all of Wandel's intrigues led to the re-election of Goodhue. He wanted that influential office in his own crowd. Even now George couldn't wholly sound Wandel's desires with him. He yielded to the general interest and uneasiness. Squibs had been right. Princeton did hold a fair sample of it all. He understood that very much as this affair was arranged he would see the political destinies of the country juggled later.

Allen got him alone, begging for his decision.

"Have you been asked for a club yet?"

"None of your business," George said, promptly.

"You've got to make up your mind in a hurry," Allen urged. "Promise me now that you'll leave the clubs alone, then I can handle Mr. Wandel."

"You're dickering with him?" George asked, quickly.

"No. Mr. Wandel is trying to dicker with me."

But George couldn't make up his mind. There were other problems as critical as the clubs. Could he afford to fight Dick Goodhue for that high office? If only he could find out what the Goodhue crowd thought of him!

He had an opportunity to learn one evening, and conquered a passionate desire to eavesdrop. As he ran lightly up the stairs to his room he heard through the open study door Wandel and Goodhue talking with an unaccustomed heat.

"You can't take such an attitude," Wandel was saying.

"I've taken it."

"Change your mind," Wandel urged. "I've nursed him along as the only possible tie between two otherwise irreconcilable elements of the class. I tell you I can't put you over unless you come to your senses."

George hurried in and nodded. From their faces he gathered there had been a fair row. Wandel grasped his arm. George stiffened. Something was coming now. It wasn't quite what he had expected.

"How would you like," Wandel said, "to be the very distinguished secretary of your class?"

George gazed from the window at the tree-bordered lawns where lesser men contentedly kicked footballs to each other.

"It ought to be what the class likes," he muttered. "I'm really only interested in seeing Dicky re-elected."

"If," Wandel said, "I told you it couldn't be done without your distinguished and untrammelled name on the ticket?"

George flushed.

"What do you mean by untrammelled?"

"You stop that, Spike," Goodhue said, more disturbed than George had ever seen him. "It's indecent. I won't have it."

George relaxed. Untrammelled had certainly meant free from the taint of the clubs. He was grateful Goodhue had interfered.

"Why don't you run for something yourself, Mr. Wandel?" he asked, dryly.

Goodhue laughed.

"Carry your filthy politics somewhere else."

He and George, with an affectation of good nature, pushed Wandel out of the room. They looked at each other. Neither said anything.

George had to call upon his will to keep his attention on his books that night. In return for Allen's support for Goodhue Wandel wanted to give Allen for a minor place on the ticket a poor man untrammelled by the clubs. The realization angered George. Aside from any other consideration he couldn't permit himself to be bartered about to save any one—even Goodhue. But was Goodhue trying to spare him at a sacrifice? George, with a vast relief, decided that that was so when Goodhue mentioned casually one day that he was a certainty for the club.

"Don't say anything about it," he advised. "The upper classmen have been getting a few of us together. I'm glad you're among us. We'll elect the full section later."

"Of course I came here a stranger," George began, trying to hide his pleasure.

"Quite a lot of us have learned to know you pretty well," Goodhue smiled.

George wouldn't accept this coveted gift without putting himself on record.

"I needn't ask you," he said, "if Dalrymple's already in."

Goodhue shook his head.

"Maybe later."

"I think," George said, distinctly, "that the men who are responsible for my election should know I'll hold out against Dalrymple."

"You're a conscientious beggar," Goodhue laughed. "It's your own business now, but there'll be a nice little rumpus just the same."

George was conscientious with Allen, too.

"I feel I ought to tell you," he said, "that I've made up my mind, if I'm asked, to join a club. Anything that has so much to offer can't be as bad as you think."

Without answering Allen flushed and walked off angrily.

It was the next day that the parties gathered on the top floor of Dickinson Hall for the election. George went as an amused spectator. He had played the game on the level and had destroyed his own chances, but he was afraid he had destroyed Goodhue's, too, or Goodhue had destroyed his own by insisting on taking George into the club. That was a sacrifice George wanted to repay.

Wandel, as usual, was undisturbed. Allen's angular figure wandered restlessly among the groups. George had no idea what the line-up was.

George sensed weakness in the fact that, when the nominations were opened, Wandel was the first on his feet. He recited Goodhue's virtues as an athlete and a scholar. Like a real political orator at a convention he examined his record as president the previous year. He placed him in nomination amid a satisfactory applause. Now what was coming? Who did Allen have?

When he arose Allen wore an air of getting through with a formality. He insisted on the fact that his candidate was working his way through college, and would always be near the top scholastically. He represented a section of the class that the more fortunate of the students were prone to forget. And so on—a condensation of his complaints to George. The room filled with suspense, which broke into loud laughter when Allen named a man of absolutely no importance or colour, who couldn't poll more than the votes of his personal friends. A trick, George guessed it, and everyone else. But Wandel was quickly moving that the nominations be closed. Allen glanced around with a worried, expectant air. Then George saw that Rogers was up—a flushed, nervous figure—and had got the floor. He spoke rapidly, nearly unintelligibly.

"My candidate doesn't need any introduction," he recited. "All factions can unite on him—the man that smashed the Yale and Harvard Freshmen. The man who is going to smash the Yale and Harvard varsities this year—George Morton!"

A cheer burst out, loud, from the heart. George saw that it came from both sides. The poor men had been stampeded, too.

Goodhue was on his feet, his arms upraised, demanding recognition. Suddenly George realized what this meant to Goodhue, and temper replaced his amazement. He sprang up, shouting:

"I won't have it——"

A dozen pairs of hands dragged him down. A dozen voices cried in his ears:

"Shut up, you damned fool!"

XXIV

Goodhue got the floor and withdrew his name, but the chairman wouldn't see or hear George. He declared the nominations closed. It was as if he and all the lesser men, who weren't leading factions, had seen in George the one force that could pull the class together. The vote was perfunctory, and Allen lazily moved to make it unanimous. George took the chair, frowning, altogether unhappy in his unforeseen victory. He had a feeling of having shabbily repaid Goodhue's loyalty and sacrifice, yet it hadn't been his fault; but would Goodhue know that?

"Speech! Shoot something, George! Talk up there, Mr. President!"

He'd give them a speech to chew over.

"Back-door politicians have done their best to split the class. The class has taken matters into its own hands. There isn't going to be a split. It won't be long before you'll have Prospect Street off your minds. That seems to be two thirds of the trouble. Let's forget it, and pull together, and leave Princeton a little better than we found it. If you think anything needs reform let's talk about it openly and sensibly, clubs and all. I appreciate the honour, but Dick Goodhue ought to have had it, would have had it, if he hadn't been born with a silver spoon. Ought a man's wealth or poverty stand against him here? Think it over. That's all."

There was no opposition to Goodhue's election as Secretary.

Allen slipped to George at the close of the meeting.

"About what I'd have expected of you, anyway."

But George was looking for Goodhue, found him, and walked home with him.

"Best thing that could have happened," Goodhue said. "They're all marvelling at your nerve for talking about Prospect Street as you did."

George spied Rogers, and beckoned the freshly prominent youth.

"See here, young man, please come to my room after practice."

Rogers, with a frightened air, promised. Wandel appeared before, quite as if nothing had happened. He wouldn't even talk about the election.

"Just the same, Warwick," George said, "I'm not at all sure a poler named Allen couldn't tell you something about juggling crowns."

"A penetrating as well as a great president," Wandel smiled. "I haven't thanked you yet for joining our club."

George looked straight at him.

"But I've thanked Dicky for it," he said.

Rogers, when he arrived after Wandel's departure, didn't want to confess, but George knew how to get it out of him.

"You've put your finger in my pie without my consent," he said. "I'll hold that against you unless you talk up. Besides, it won't go beyond Goodhue and me. It's just for our information."

"All right," Rogers agreed, nervously, "provided it doesn't go out of this room. And there's no point mentioning names. A man we all know came to me this morning and talked about the split in the class. He couldn't get Goodhue elected because he didn't have any way of buying the support of the poor men. Allen, he figured, was going to nominate a lame duck, and then have somebody not too rich and not too poor spring his own name, figuring he would get the votes of the bulk of the class which just can't help being jealous of Goodhue and his little crowd. This chap thought he could beat Allen at that game by stampeding the class for you before Allen could get himself up, and he wanted somebody representative of the bulk of the class, that holds the balance of power, to put you in nomination. He figured even the poor men would flock to you in spite of Allen's opposition."

"And what did he offer you?" George sneered.

Rogers turned away without answering.

"Like Driggs," Goodhue said, when Rogers had gone. "He couldn't have what he wanted, but he got about as good. Politically, what's the difference? Both offices are in his crowd, but he's avoided making you look like his president."

George grinned.

"I don't wonder you call him Spike."

XXV

George, filled with a cold triumph, stared for a long time at Sylvia's portrait that night. If she thought of him at all she would have to admit he had come closer. At Princeton he was as big a man as her rich brother was at Yale. He belonged to a club where her own kind gathered. Give him money—and he was going to have that—and her attitude must alter. He bent the broken crop between his fingers, his triumph fading. He had come closer, but not close enough to hurt.

The Baillys and Betty congratulated him at practice the next day.

"You were the logical man," Betty said, "but the politicians didn't seem to want you."

Bailly drew him aside.

"It was scandal in the forum," he said, "that money and the clubs were an issue in this election."

George fingered his headgear, laughing unpleasantly.

"Yes, and they elected a poor man; a low sort of a fellow with a shadowed past."

"Forget your past," Bailly pled, "and remember in the present that the poor men, who helped elect you, are looking for your guidance. They need help."

"Then," George said, "why didn't they get themselves elected so they could help themselves?"

"Into the world there are born many cripples," Bailly said, softly. "Would you condemn them for not running as fast as the congenitally sound?"

"Trouble is, they don't try to run," George answered.

He looked at the other defiantly. Bailly had to know. It was his right.

"I can guess what house I'm going to on Prospect Street."

"Which?" Bailly sighed.

"To the very home of reaction," George laughed. "But it's easier to reform from the inside."

"No," Bailly said, gravely. "The chairs are too comfortable."

He pressed George's arm.

"It isn't the clubs here that worry me in relation to you. It's the principle of the lights behind the railing in the restless world. Try not to surrender to the habit of the guarded light."

George was glad when Stringham called from the field.

"Jump in here, Morton!"

He took his turn at the dummy scrimmage. Such exercise failed to offer its old zest, nor was it the first day he had appreciated that. The intrusion of these unquiet struggles might be responsible, yet, with them determined in his favour, his anxiety did not diminish. Was Bailly to blame with his perpetual nagging about the outside world where grave decisions waited? George frankly didn't want to face them. They seemed half-decipherable signposts which tempted him perplexingly and precariously from his path. What had just happened, added to the passage of a year and his summer in Wall Street, had brought that headlong world very close, had outlined too clearly the barriers which made it dangerous; so even here he spent some time each night studying the changing lines in the battle for money.

Yet Goodhue, with a settled outlook, shared George's misgivings at the field.

"It isn't the fun it was Freshman year," he grumbled one night. "We used to complain then that they worked us too hard. Now I don't believe they work us hard enough."

That was a serious doubt for two men who realized they alone might save inferior if eager material from defeat; and it grew until they resumed surreptitiously the extra work they had attempted hitherto only outside of the season or just at its commencement. Then it had not interfered with Green's minutely studied scheme of physical development. Now it did. The growth of their worry, moreover, measured the decline of their condition. These apprehensions had a sharper meaning for George than for his room-mate. Almost daily he saw his picture on the sporting pages of newspapers. "Morton of Princeton, the longest kicker in the game." "The keystone of the Princeton attack." "The man picked to lead Stringham's hopes to victory over Harvard and Yale." And so on. Exaggeration, George told himself, that would induce the university, the alumni, the Baillys, Betty, and Sylvia—most of all Sylvia—to expect more than he could reasonably give at his best.

"Don't forget you've promised to take care of Lambert Planter——"

In some form Betty repeated it every time George saw her. It irritated him—not that it really made any difference—that Lambert Planter should occupy her mind to that extent. No emotion as impersonal as college spirit would account for it; and somehow it did make a difference.

George suspected the truth a few days before the Harvard game, and persuaded Goodhue to abandon all exercise away from Green's watchful eye; but he went on the field still listless, irritable, and stale.

That game, as so frequently happens, was the best played and the prettiest to watch of the season. George wondered if Sylvia was in the crowd. There was no question about her being at New Haven next week. He wanted to save his best for that afternoon when she would be sure to see him, when he would take her brother on for another thrashing. But it wasn't in him to hold back anything, and the cheering section, where Squibs sat, demanded all he had. To win this game, it became clear after the first few plays, would take an exceptional effort. Only George's long and well-calculated kicking held down the Harvard attack. Toward the close of the first half a fumble gave Princeton the ball on Harvard's thirty-yard line, and Goodhue for the first time seriously called on George to smash the Harvard defence. With his effort some of the old zest returned. Twice he made it first down by inches.

"Stick to your interference," Goodhue was begging him between each play.

Then, with his interference blocked and tumbling, George yielded to his old habit, and slipped off to one side at a hazard. The enemy secondary defence had been drawing in, and there was no one near enough to stop him within those ten yards, and he went over for a touchdown, and casually kicked the goal.

When, a few minutes later, he walked off the field, he experienced no elation. He realized all at once how tired he was. Like a child he wanted to go to Stringham and say:

"Stringham, I don't want to play any more games to-day. I want to lie down and rest."

He smiled as he dreamed of Stringham's reply.

It was Stringham, really, who came to him as he sat silently and with drooping shoulders in the dressing-room.

"What's wrong here? When you're hurt I want to know it."

George got up.

"I'm not hurt. I'm all right."

Green arrived and helped Stringham poke while George submitted, wishing they'd leave him alone so he could sit down and rest.

"We've got to have him next week," Stringham said, "but this game isn't won by a long shot."

"What's the matter with me?" George asked. "I'll play."

He heard a man near by remark:

"He's got the colour of a Latin Salutatorian."

They let him go back, nevertheless, and at the start he suffered his first serious injury. He knew when he made the tackle that the strap of his headgear snapped. He felt the leather slide from his head, experienced the crushing of many bodies, had a brief conviction that the sun had been smothered. His next impression was of bare, white walls in a shaded room. His brain held no record of the hushing of the multitude when he had remained stretched in his darkness on the trampled grass; of the increasing general fear while substitutes had carried him from the field on a stretcher; or of the desertion of the game by the Baillys, by Betty and her father, by Wandel, the inscrutable, even by the revolutionary Allen, by a score of others, who had crowded the entrance of the dressing room asking hushed questions, and a few moments later had formed behind him a silent and frightened procession as he had been carried to the infirmary. Mrs. Bailly told him about it.

"I saw tears in Betty's eyes," she said, softly, "through my own. It was so like a funeral march."

"And you missed the end of the game?" George asked.

She nodded.

"When my husband knew Harvard had scored he said, 'That wouldn't have happened if George had been there.' And it wouldn't have."

But all George could think of was:

"Squibs missed half a game for me, and there were tears in Betty's eyes."

Tears, because he had suggested the dreadful protagonist of a funeral march.

His period of consciousness was brief. He drifted into the darkness once more, accompanied by that extraordinary and seductive vision of Betty in tears. It came with him late the next morning back into the light. Sylvia's portrait was locked in a drawer far across the campus. What superb luxury to lie here with such a recollection, forecasting no near physical effort, quite relaxed, dreaming of Betty, who had always meant rest as Sylvia had always meant unquiet and absorbing struggle.

He judged it wise to pretend to be asleep, but hunger at last made him stir and threw him into an anxious agitation of examinations by specialists, of conferences with coaches, and of doubts and prayers and exhortations from everyone admitted to the room; for even the specialists were Princeton men. They were non-committal. It had been a nasty blow. There had been some concussion. They would guarantee him in two weeks, but of course he didn't have that long. One old fellow turned suspiciously on Green.

"He was overworked when he got hurt."

"I'll be all right," George kept saying, "if you'll fix a headgear to cover my new soft spot."

And finally:

"I'll be all right if you'll only leave me alone."

Yet, when they had, Squibs came, totally forgetful of his grave problems of the classes, foreseeing no disaster nearly as serious as a defeat by Yale—"now that we've done so well against Harvard, and would have done better if you hadn't got hurt"—limping the length of the sick-room until the nurse lost her temper and drove him out. Then Goodhue arrived as the herald of Josiah Blodgett, of all people.

"This does me good," George pled with the nurse.

And it did. For the first time in a number of weeks he felt amused as Blodgett with a pinkish silk handkerchief massaged his round, unhealthy face.

"Thought you didn't like football," George said.

"Less reason to like it now," Blodgett jerked out. "Only sensible place to play it is the front yard of a hospital. Thought I'd come down and watch you and maybe look up what was left afterward."

George fancied a wavering of the little eyes in Goodhue's direction, and became even more amused, for he believed a more calculating man than Blodgett didn't live; yet there seemed a real concern in the man's insistence that George, with football out of the way, should spend a recuperative Thanksgiving at his country place. George thought he would. He was going to work again for Blodgett next summer.

Betty and Mrs. Bailly were the last callers the nurse would give in to, although she must have seen how they helped, one in a chair on either side of the bed; and it was difficult not to look at only one. In her eyes he sought for a souvenir of those tears, and wanted to tell her how sorry he was; but he wasn't really sorry, and anyway she mustn't guess that he knew. Why had Mrs. Bailly bothered to tell him at all? Could her motherly instinct hope for a coming together so far beyond belief? His memory of the remote portrait reminded him that it was incredible in every way. He sighed. Betty beckoned Mrs. Bailly and rose.

"Don't go," George begged, aware that he ought to urge her to go.

"Betty was having tea with me," Mrs. Bailly offered.

"I would have asked to be brought anyway," Betty said, openly. "You frightened us yesterday. We've all wanted to find out the truth."

There was in her eyes now at least a reminiscent pain.

"Don't worry," he said, "I'll take care of Lambert Planter for you after all."

She stooped swiftly and offered her hand.

"You'll take care of yourself. It would be beastly if they let you play at the slightest risk."

He grasped her hand. The touch of her flesh, combined with such a memory, made him momentarily forgetful. He held her hand too long, too firmly. He saw the colour waver in her pale cheeks. He let her hand go, but he continued to watch her eyes until they turned uncertainly to Mrs. Bailly.

When they had left he slept again. He slept away his listlessness of the past few weeks. As he confided to his callers, who were confined to an hour in the afternoon, he did nothing but sleep and eat. He was more content than he had been since his indifferent days, long past, at Oakmont. All these people had deserted the game for him when he was no longer of any use to the game. Then he had acquired, even for such clashing types as Wandel and Allen, a value that survived his football. He had advanced on a road where he had not consciously set his feet. He treasured that thought. Next Saturday he would reward these friends, for he was confident he could do it now. By Wednesday he was up and dressed, feeling better than he had since the commencement of the season. If only they didn't hurt his head again! The newspapers helped there, too. If he played, they said, it would be under a severe handicap. He smiled, knowing he was far fitter, except for his head, than he had been the week before.

Until the squad left for New Haven he continued to live in the infirmary, watching the light practice of the last days without even putting on his football clothes.

"The lay-off won't hurt me," he promised.

Stringham and Green were content to accept his judgment.

As soon as he was able he went to his room and got Sylvia's portrait. He disciplined himself for his temporary weakness following the accident. He tried to force from his memory the sentiment aroused by Betty's tears through the thought that he approached his first real chance to impress Sylvia. He could do it. He was like an animal insufficiently exercised, straining to be away.

XXVI

He alone, as the squad dressed in the gymnasium, displayed no signs of misgiving. Here was the climax of the season. All the better. The larger the need the greater one's performance must be. But the others didn't share that simple faith.

He enjoyed the ride to the field in the cold, clear air, through hurrying, noisy, and colourful crowds. He liked the impromptu cheers they gave the team, sometimes himself particularly.

In the field dressing-room, like men condemned, the players received their final instructions. Already they were half beaten because they were going to face Yale—all but George, who knew he was going to play better than ever, because he was going to face one Yale man, Lambert Planter, with Sylvia in the stands. He kept repeating to himself:

"I will! I will!"

He laughed at the others.

"There aren't any wild beasts out there—just eleven men like ourselves. If there's going to be any wild-beasting let's do it to them."

They trotted through an opening into a vast place walled by men and women. At their appearance the walls seemed to disintegrate, and a chaotic noise went up as if from that ponderous convulsion.

George dug his toes into the moist turf and looked about. Sylvia was there, a tiny unit in the disturbed enclosure, but if she had sat alone it would have made no difference. His incentive would have been unaltered.

Again the convulsion, and the Yale team was on the field. George singled Planter out—the other man that Sylvia would watch to-day. He did look fit, and bigger than last year. George shrugged his shoulders.

"I will!"

Nevertheless, he was grateful for his week of absolute rest. He smiled as the crowd applauded his long kicks to the backs. He wasn't exerting himself now.

The two captains went to the centre of the field while the teams trotted off. Lambert came up to George.

"The return match," he said, "and you won't want another."

George grinned.

"I've heard it's the Yale system to try to frighten the young opponent."

"You'll know more about the Yale system after the first half," Lambert said, and walked on.

George realized that Lambert hadn't smiled once. In his face not a trace of the old banter had shown. Yale system or Yale spirit, it possessed visible qualities of determination and peril, but he told himself he could lick Lambert and smile while doing it.

At the whistle he was off like a race horse, never losing sight of Lambert until he was reasonably sure the ball wouldn't get to him. They clashed personally almost at the start. Yale had the ball, and Lambert took it, and tore through the line, and lunged ahead with growing speed and power. George met him head on. They smashed to the ground. As he hugged Lambert there for a moment George whispered:

"Nothing fantastic about that, is there? Now get past me, Mr. Planter."

The tackle had been vicious. Lambert rose rather slowly to his feet.

George's kicks outdistanced Lambert's. Once he was forced by a Princeton fumble, and a march of thirty yards by Yale, to kick from behind his own goal line. He did exert himself then, and he outguessed the two men lying back. As a result Yale put the ball in play on her own thirty-yard line, while the stands marvelled, the Princeton side demonstratively, yet George, long before the half was over, became conscious of something not quite right. Since beyond question he was the star of his team he received a painstaking attention from the Yale men. There is plenty of legitimate roughness in football, and it can be concentrated. In every play he was reminded of the respect Yale had for him. Perpetually he tried to spare his head, but it commenced to ache abominably, and after a tackle by Lambert, to repay him for some of his own deadly and painful ones, he got up momentarily dazed.

"Let's do something now," he pled with Goodhue, when, thanks to his kicks, they had got the ball at midfield. He wanted a score before this silly weakness could put him out. With a superb skill he went after a score. His forward passes to Goodhue and the ends were well-conceived, beautifully executed, and frequently successful. Many times he took the ball himself, fighting through the line or outside of tackle to run against Lambert or another back. Once he got loose for a run of fifteen yards, dodging or shaking off half the Yale team while the stands with primeval ferocity approved and prayed.

That made it first down on Yale's five-yard line. He was absolutely confident that the Yale team could not prevent his taking the ball over in the next few plays.

"I will! I will! I will!" he said to himself.

Alone, he felt, he could overcome that five yards against the eleven of them.

"Let's have it, Dicky," he whispered. "I'm going over this play or the next. Shoot me outside of tackle."

On the first play Goodhue fumbled, and a Yale guard fell on the ball. George stared, stifling an instinct to destroy his friend. The chance had been thrown away, and his head made him suffer more and more. Then he saw that Goodhue wanted to die, and as they went back to place themselves for the Yale kick, George said:

"You've proved we can get through them. Next time!"

Would there be a next time? And Goodhue didn't seem to hear. With all his enviable inheritance and training he failed to conceal a passionate remorse; his conviction of a peculiar and unforgivable criminality.

In the dressing-room a few minutes later some of the players bitterly recalled that ghastly error, and a coach or two turned furiously on the culprit. It was too bad Squibs and Allen weren't there to watch George's white temper, an emotion he didn't understand himself, born, he tried to explain it later, of his hurt head.

"Cut that out!" he snarled.

The temper of one of the coaches—an assistant—flamed back.

"It was handing the game on a——"

George reached out and caught the shoulders of that man who during the season had ordered him around. The ringing in his head, the increasing pain, had destroyed all memory of discipline.

"Say another word and I'll throw you out of here."

The room fell silent. Some men gasped. The coach shrank from the furious face, tried to elude the powerful grasp. Stringham hurried up. George let the other go.

"Mr. Stringham," he said, quietly, "if there's any more of this I'll quit right now, and so will the rest of the team if they've any pluck."

Stringham motioned the coach away, soothed George, led him to a chair, where Green and a doctor got off his battered headgear. George wanted to scream, but he conquered the brimming impulse, and managed to speak rationally.

"You've done all you can for us. We've got to play the game ourselves, and we're not giving anything away. We're not making any mistakes we can help."

Goodhue came up and gripped his shoulder. The touch quieted him.

"This man oughtn't to go back, Green," the doctor announced.

George stiffened. He hadn't made that score. He hadn't smashed Lambert Planter half enough. Better to leave the field on a stretcher, and in darkness again, than to quit like this: to walk out between the halves; not to walk back. He began to lie, overcoming a physical agony of which he had never imagined his powerful body capable.

"No, that doesn't hurt, nor that," he replied, calmly, to the doctor's questions. "Don't think I'm nutty because I lost my temper. My head's all right. That gear's fine."

So they let him go back, and he counted the plays, willing himself to receive and overcome the pounding each down brought him, continuing by pure force of will to outplay Lambert; to save his team from dangerous gains, from possible scores; nearly breaking away himself half-a-dozen times, although the Princeton eleven was tiring and much of the play was in its territory.

The sun had gone behind heavy clouds. A few snowflakes fluttered down. It was nearly dark. In spite of his exertions he felt cold, and knew it for an evil sign. Once or twice he shivered. His throbbing head gave him an illusion of having grown enormously so that it got in everybody's way. Instinctively he caught a Yale forward pass on his own thirty-yard line and tore off, slinging tacklers aside with the successful fury of a young bull all of whose dangerous actions are automatic. He had come a long way. He didn't know just how far, but the Yale goal posts were near. Then, quite consciously, he saw Lambert Planter cutting across to intercept him. The meeting of the two was unavoidable. He thought he heard Lambert's voice.

"Not past me!"

Lambert plunged for the tackle. George's right hand shot out and smashed open against Lambert's face. He raced on, leaving Lambert sprawled and clawing at the ground.

The quarterback managed to bring him down on the eight-yard line, then lost him; yet, before George could get to his feet others had pounced, and his heavy, awkward head had crashed against the earth again.

They dragged him to his feet. For a few moments he lurched about, shaking off friendly hands.

"Only five minutes more, George," somebody prayed.

Only five minutes! Good God! For him each moment was a century of unspeakable martyrdom. Flecks of rain or snow touched his face, lifted in revolt. The contact, wet and cold, cleared his brain a trifle—let in the screaming of the multitude, hoarse and incoherent, raised at first in thanksgiving for his run, then, after its close, altering to menacing disappointment and command. What business had they to tell him what to do? Up there, warm and comfortable, undergoing no exercise more violent than occasional excited rising and sitting down, they had the selfish impudence to order him to make a touchdown. Why should he obey, or even try? He had done his job, more than any one could reasonably have asked of him. He had outplayed Lambert, gained more ground than any man on the field, made more valuable tackles. Could he really impress Sylvia any further? Why shouldn't he walk off now in the face of those unjust commands to the rest he had earned and craved with all his body and mind?

"Touchdown! Touchdown! Touchdown! Morton! Morton! Morton!"

Damn them! Why not, indeed, walk off, where he wouldn't have to listen to that thoughtless and autocratic impertinence?

He glanced down at his blackened hands, at his filthy breeches, at his jersey striped about the sleeves with orange; and with a wave of self-loathing he knew why he couldn't go. He had sworn never to wear anything like livery again, yet here he was—in livery, a servant to men and women who asked dreadful things without troubling even to approximate the agony of obedience.

"I'll not be a servant," he had told Bailly.

Bailly had made him one after all, and an old phrase of the tutor's slipped back:

"Some day, young man, you'll learn that the world lives by service."

George had not believed. Now for a moment his half-conscious brain knew Bailly had been right. He had to serve.

He knocked aside the sponge Green held to his face. He indicated the bucket of cold water the trainer had carried out.

"Throw it over my head," he said, "the whole thing. Throw it hard."

Green obeyed. He, too, who ought to have understood, was selfish and imperious.

"You make a touchdown!" he commanded hoarsely.

The water stung George's eyes, rushed down his neck in thrilling streams, braced him for the time. The teams lined up while the Princeton stands roared approval that their best servant should remain on the job.

Goodhue called the signal for a play around the left tackle. Every Yale player was confident that George would take the ball, sensed the direction of the play, and, over-anxious, massed there, all but the quarter, who lay back between the goal posts. George saw, and turned sharply, darting to the right. Suddenly he knew, because of that over-anxiety of Yale, that he had a touchdown. Only the Yale quarterback had a chance for the tackle, and he couldn't stop George in that distance.

Out of the corner of his eye George noticed Goodhue standing to the right and a little behind. He, too, must have seen the victorious outcome of the play, and George caught in his attitude again that air of a unique criminal. They'd hold that fumble against Dicky forever unless—if Goodhue had the ball the Yale quarter couldn't even get his hands on him until he had crossed the line.

"Dicky!"

The dejected figure sprang into action. Without weighing his sacrifice, without letting himself think of the crime of disobeying a signal, of the risks of a hurried throw or of another fumble, George shot the ball across, then forged ahead and put the Yale quarterback out of the play, while Goodhue strolled across the line and set the ball down behind the goal posts.

As he went back to kick the goal George heard through the crashing cacophony from the stands Goodhue's uncertain voice:

"Why didn't you make that touchdown yourself? It was yours. You had it. You had earned it."

"It was the team's," George answered, shortly. "I might have been spilled. Sure thing for you."

"You precious idiot!" Goodhue whispered.

As George kicked the goal there came to him again, across his pain, that sensation of being on a road he had not consciously set out to explore. He wondered why he was so well content.

Eternity ended. With the whistle and the crunching of the horn George staggered to his feet. Goodhue and another player supported him while the team clustered for a cheer for Yale. The Princeton stands were a terrific avalanche descending upon that little group. Green tried to rescue him, shouting out his condition; but the avalanche wouldn't have it. It dashed upon him, tossed him shoulder high, while it emitted crashing noises out of which his name emerged.

Goodhue was up also, and the others. Goodhue was gesturing and talking, pointing in his direction. Soon Goodhue and the others were down. The happy holocaust centred its efforts on George. Why? Had Goodhue given things away about that touchdown? Anyhow, they knew how to reward their servants, these people.

They carried George on strong shoulders at the head of their careening procession. His dazed brain understood that they desired to honour the man who had done the giant's share, the one who had made victory possible, and he sensed a wrong, a sublime ignorance or indifference that they should carry only him. The victory went back of George Morton. He bent down, screaming into the ears of his bearers.

"Squibs Bailly! He found me. If it wasn't for him I wouldn't have played to-day. Bailly, or let me down! Bailly made that run! I tell you, Bailly played that game!"

In his earnestness he grew hysterical.

Maybe it was because they wanted to humour the hero, or perhaps they caught his own hysteria, realizing what Bailly had done for him. They stopped in front of the stands to which Bailly's bad foot had condemned him during this triumphant march. They commenced a high-pitched, frantic chant.

"We want Squibs Bailly! We want Squibs Bailly! We want Squibs Bailly!"

George waved his hands, holding the column until the slender figure, urged by the spectators remaining in the stands, came down with difficulty and embarrassment to be caught and lifted tenderly up beside George.

Then, with these two aloft in the very front, the wild march was resumed through the Yale goal posts while Squibs' wrinkled face twitched, while in his young eyes burned the unsurpassable light of a hopeless wish miraculously come true.

Green rescued George when his head was drooping and his eyes blurred. He got him to the gymnasium and stretched him out there and set the doctors to work on his head.

A voice got into George's brain. Who was talking? Was it Goodhue, or Stringham?

"I guess you can see him, but he's pretty vague. Played the whole game with a broken head. Lied to the doctors."

George forced his eyes open. Lambert Planter, still in his stained football clothes, bent over him.

"Hello, Planter!"

Lambert grasped the black hand.

"Hello, George Morton!"

That was all. Lambert went away, but George knew that what he had really said was:

"It's only what you've made of yourself that counts."

XXVIII

At Princeton they kept him in the infirmary for a few days, but he didn't like it. It filled him with a growing fear. Since it made no particular difference now how long he was ill, they let him see too many callers. He distrusted hero worship. Most of all was he afraid when such devotion came from Betty.

"Being a vicarious hero," Mrs. Bailly said, "has made my husband the happiest man in Princeton."

After that she didn't enter the conversation much, and again George sensed, with a reluctant thrill, a maternal caring in her heart for him.

"You never ought to have gone back in the second half," Betty said.

"If I hadn't," he laughed, "who would have taken care of Lambert Planter for you?"

"Squibs says you might have been killed."

"He's a great romancer," George exploded.

"Just the same, it was splendid of you to play at all."

She touched the white bandage about his head.

"Does it hurt a great deal?"

"No," he said, nearly honestly. "I only let them keep me here to cut some dull lectures."

He glanced at Betty wistfully.

"Did I take care of Lambert Planter as you wanted?"

She glanced away.

"Are you punishing me? Haven't you read the papers? You outplayed him and every man on the field."

"That was what you wished?"

She turned back with an assumption of impatience.

"What do you mean?"

He couldn't tell her. He couldn't probe further into her feelings for Lambert, her attitude toward himself. He had to get his mind in hand again.

Betty brought her mother one day. Mrs. Alston was full of praise, but she exuded an imperial distaste for his sick-room. Both times he had to overcome an impulse to beg Betty not to go so soon. That more than anything else made him afraid of himself. It was, he felt, an excellent change to escape to an active life.

Blodgett's place gave him a massive, tasteless welcome. It was one of those houses with high, sloping roofs, numerous chimneys, and much sculptured stone, slightly reminiscent of Mansart, and enormously suggestive of that greatest architect of all, the big round dollar. In its grounds it fitted like a huge diamond on a flowered shirt-front. There were terraces; and a sunken garden, a little self-conscious with coy replicas of regency sculpture; and formal walks between carefully barbered trees and hedges. It convinced George that his original choice of three necessities had been wise. Blodgett had the money, but he didn't have Squibs Bailly and Goodhue or the things they personified. And how Blodgett coveted The Goodhue Quality! George told himself that was why he had been asked, because he was so close to Goodhue. But Blodgett let him see that there was another motive. After those games George was temporarily one of the nation's famous men.

It wasn't until he had arrived that George understood how near Blodgett's place was to Oakmont—not more than fifteen miles. He was interested, but he had no idea, even if the Planters were there for Thanksgiving, that he would see any of them.

At Blodgett's bachelor enormity people came and went. At times the huge, over-decorated rooms were filled, yet to George they seemed depressingly empty because he knew they didn't enclose the men and the women Blodgett wanted. Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair, indeed, motored out for Thanksgiving dinner—a reluctant concession, George gathered, to a profitable partnership. Blodgett brought him forth as a specimen, and the specimen impressed, for it isn't given to everyone to sit down at the close of the season with the year's most famous football player. It puzzled George that in the precious qualities he craved he knew himself superior to everyone in the house except these two who made him feel depressingly inferior. Would he some day reach the point where he would react unconsciously, as they did, to every social emergency?

When the dinner party had scattered, Blodgett and he walked alone on the terrace in an ashen twilight. There the surprise was sprung. It was clearly no surprise to his host, who beamed at George, pointing to the drive.

"I 'phoned him he would find an old football friend here if he'd take the trouble to drive over."

"But you didn't tell him my name?" George gasped.

"No, but why——"

Blodgett broke off and hurried his heavy body to the terrace edge to greet these important arrivals.

Lambert sprang from the runabout he had driven up and helped Sylvia down. She was bundled in becoming furs. The sharp air had heightened her rich colouring. How beautiful she was—lovelier than George had remembered! Here was the tonic to kill the distracting doubts raised by Betty. Here was the very spring of his wilful ambition. Glancing at Sylvia, Betty's tranquil influence lost its power.

At her first recognition of him she stopped abruptly, but Lambert ran across and grasped his hand.

"How do, Morton. Never guessed Blodgett's message referred to you."

George disapproved of Blodgett's methods. Why had the man made him a mystery at the very moment he used him as a bait to attract Lambert and Sylvia? Wasn't he important enough, or was it only because he was a Princeton man and Blodgett had feared some enmity might linger?

Lambert's manner, at least, was proof that he had, indeed, meant to give George a message that night in the dressing-room at New Haven. George appreciated that "How do, Morton"—greeting at last of a man for a man instead of a man for a servant or a former servant; nor was Lambert's call to his sister without a significance nearly sharp enough to hurt.

"Sylvia! Didn't you meet this strong-armed Princetonian at Betty's dance a year ago?"

George understood that she had no such motives as Lambert's for altering her attitude, so much more uncompromising from the beginning than his. There had been no contact or shared pain. Only what she might have observed from a remote stand that Saturday could have affected her. How would she respond now?

She advanced slowly, at first bewildered, then angry. But Blodgett had nothing but his money to recommend him to her. She wouldn't, George was certain, bare any intimacies of emotion before him.

"I rather think I did."

In her eyes George recognized the challenge he had last seen there.

"Thanks for remembering me," he said rather in Wandel's manner.

"A week ago Saturday——" she began, uncertainly, as though her remembering needed an apology.

"Who could forget the great Morton?" Lambert laughed. "With a broken head he beat Yale. That was a hard game to lose."

"I'd heard," she said, indifferently, "that you had been hurt."

George would have preferred words as ugly and unforgettable as those she had attacked him with the day of her accident. She turned to Blodgett. George had an instinct to shake her as she chatted easily and casually, glancing at him from time to time. He could have borne it better if she hadn't included him at all.

He was glad her brother occupied him. Lambert was for dissecting each play of the game, and he made no attempt to hide the admiration for George it had aroused. He gave the impression that he knew very well men didn't do such things—particularly that little trick with Goodhue—unless they were the right sort.

Blodgett said something about tea. They strolled into the house. A fire burned in the great hall. That was the only light. George came last, directly after Sylvia.

"So you're a friend of Mr. Blodgett's!" she said with an intonation intended to hurt.

"I wouldn't have expected," he answered, easily, "to find you a caller here."

She paused and faced him. Lights from the distant fire got as far as her face, disclosing her contempt. He wouldn't let her speak.

"I won't have you think I had anything to do with bringing you. I never guessed until I saw your brother drive up."

She didn't believe him, or she tried to impress him with that affront. Blodgett and Lambert had gone on into the library. They remained quite alone in the huge, dusky hall, whose shadow masses shifted as the fire blazed and fell. For the first time since their ancient rides he could talk to her undisturbed. He wouldn't let that fact tie his tongue. She couldn't call him "stable boy" now, although she did try to say "beast" in another way. This solitude in the dusk, shared with her, stripped every distracting thought from his mind. He was as hard as steel and happy in his inflexibility.

"You believe me," he said.

She shook her head and turned for the door.

"Let me say one thing," he urged. "It's rather important."

She came back through the shadows, her attitude reminiscent of the one she had assumed long ago when she had sought to hurt him. He caught his breath, waiting.

"There is nothing," she said, shivering a little in spite of the hall's warmth and the furs she still wore, "that you would think of saying to me if you had changed at all from the impertinent groom I had to have discharged."

He laughed.

"Oh! Call me anything you please, only I've always wanted to thank you for not making a scene at Miss Alston's dance a year ago."

He would be disappointed if that failed to hurt back. The thought of Sylvia Planter making a scene! At least it fanned her temper.

"What is there," she threatened, defensively, "to prevent my telling Mr. Blodgett, any one I please, now?"

"Nothing, except that I'm a trifle more on my feet," he answered. "I'm not sure your scandal would blow me over. We're going to meet again frequently. It can't he helped."

"I never want," she said, as if speaking of something unclean and revolting, "to see you again."

His chance had come.

"You're unfair, because it was you yourself, Miss Planter, who warned me I shouldn't forget. I haven't. I won't. Will you? Can't we shake hands on that understanding?"

With a hurried movement she hid her hands.

"I couldn't touch you——"

"You will when we dance."

He thought her lips trembled a little, but the light was uncertain.

"I will never dance with you again."

"I'm afraid you'll have to," he said with a confident smile, "unless you care to make a scene."

She drew away, unfastening her cloak, her eyes full of that old challenge.

"You're impossible," she whispered. "Can't you understand that I dislike you?"

His heart leapt, for didn't he hate her?

XXIX

Lambert appeared in the doorway.

"Blodgett's rung for tea——"

He glanced curiously from one to the other. The broken shadows disclosed little, but the fact that she had lingered at all was arresting.

"What's up, Sylvia?"

She went close to her brother.

"This—this old servant has been impertinent again."

Lambert smiled.

"He's rather more than that now, sis. That's over—forgotten. Still if the Princeton fellow Morton's been impertinent——"

He spread his arms, smiling.

"Have I got to submit myself to a trouncing more than once a year?"

Sylvia shrugged her shoulders.

"No," she said, impatiently. "You say it's forgotten. All right."

George knew it would never be forgotten now by either of them. Lambert's unruffled attitude made him uneasy. Her brother's scoffing response to her accusation suggested that Lambert saw, since they would be more or less thrown together, a beneficial side to such encounters as the one just ended. For George didn't dream that Lambert had forgotten, either, those old boasts.

Another depressing thought made him bad company for Blodgett after the callers had driven away. It came from a survey, following his glimpse of Sylvia's beauty, of all the blatant magnificence with which Blodgett had surrounded himself. Blodgett after dinner, a little flushed with wine, and the triumph of having had in his house on the same day two Sinclairs and two Planters, attempted an explanation.

"I didn't build this, Morton, or my place in town, just for Josiah Blodgett."

George wasn't in a mood for subtleties of expression.

"I've often wondered why you haven't married. With your money you ought to have a big choice."

Blodgett sipped a liqueur. He smiled in a self-satisfied way.

"Money will buy about anything—even the kind of a wife you want. I'm in no hurry. When I marry, young man, it will be the right kind."

And George understood that he meant by the right kind some popular and well-bred girl who would make the Blodgett family hit a social average.

He carried that terrifying thought of marriage back to Princeton. He had no fear Sylvia would ever look seriously in Blodgett's direction. Money could scarcely bribe her. This, however, was her second season. Of course she would marry someone of her own immediate circle. She could take her choice. When that happened what would become of his determination and his boasts? Frequently he clenched her riding crop and swore:

"Nothing—not even that—can keep me from accomplishing what I've set out to do. I'll have my way with her."

He shrank, nevertheless, from the thought of her adopting such a defence. It was intolerable. He read the New York papers with growing suspense. As an antidote he attacked harder than ever his study of cause and effect in the Street. With football out of the way he could give a good deal of time to that, and Blodgett now and then enclosed a hint in Mundy's letters. It was possible to send a fair amount of money to his parents; but his mother's letters never varied from their formality of thanks and solicitations as to his health. His father didn't write at all. Of course, they couldn't understand what he was doing. The shadow of the great Planter remained perpetually over their little home.

Another doubt troubled George. With the club matter out of the way, and the presidency of the class his, and a full football garland resting on his head, was he wasting his time at Princeton? The remembrance of Blodgett steadied him. He needed all that Princeton and its companionships could give.

Purposefully he avoided Betty. Was she, indeed, responsible for that softness he had yielded to in the infirmary and during the final game? In his life, he kept telling himself, there was no room for sentiment. Sentiment was childish, a hindrance. Hadn't he decided at the start that nothing should turn him from his attempt for the summit? Still he couldn't avoid seeing Betty now and then in Princeton, or at the dances in New York to which he went with Goodhue. The less he saw of Betty, moreover, the stronger grew his feeling of something essential lacking from his life; and it bothered that, after a long separation, she was invariably friendly instead of reproachful. He found that he couldn't look at her eyes without hungrily trying to picture them wet with tears for him.

To some extent other demands took his mind from such problems. The rumpus Goodhue had foreseen developed. Important men came or wrote from New York or Philadelphia in Dalrymple's cause, but at the meetings of the section George sat obdurate, and, when the struggle approached a crisis, Goodhue came out openly on the side of his room-mate.

"You can have Dalrymple in the club," was George's ultimatum, "or you can have me, but you can't have us both."

If George resigned, Goodhue announced, he would follow. Dalrymple was doomed. The important men went back or ceased writing. Then Wandel slipped Rogers into the charmed circle—the payment of a debt; and George laughed and left the meeting, saying:

"You can elect anybody you please now."

Cynically, he was tempted to try to force Allen in.

"You're not honest even with your own group," he said afterward to Wandel.

The club lost its value as a marker of progress. Besides, he didn't look forward to eating with that little snob, Rogers, for two years. Nor did he quite care for Wandel's reply.

"You've enough class-consciousness for both of us, heroic and puissant Apollo."

For the first time George let himself go with Wandel.

"You'll find Apollo Nemesis, little man, unless you learn to say what you mean in words of one syllable."

And the discussion of the clubs went on, breeding enmities but determining no radical reform.

The struggle at Princeton was over. George looked often at the younger men, who didn't have to prepare themselves minutely for the greater struggle just ahead, envying them their careless play, their proneness to over-indulgence in beer and syncopated song. While he worked with high and low prices and variations in exchange he heard them calling cheerily across the campus, gathering parties for poker or bridge or a session at the Nassau. Goodhue, even Wandel, found some time for frivolity. George strangled his instinct to join them. He had too much to do. In every diversion he took he wanted to feel there was a phase personally valuable to him.

He counted the days between his glimpses of Sylvia, and tried not to measure the hours dividing his meetings with Betty. If only he dared let himself go, dared cease battle for a little, dared justify Sylvia's attitude! Even Goodhue noticed his avoidance of Betty.

He encountered Sylvia in New York; asked her to dance with him; was refused; cut in when she was, in a sense, helpless; and glided around the room with a sullen, brilliant body that fairly palpitated with distaste.

Even during the summer he ran into her once on Long Island. Then he was always missing her. Perhaps she had learned to avoid him. He shrank each morning from his paper, from any bit of rumour connecting her with a man; and Blodgett, he noticed, was still making money for a bachelor bank account.

He came to conceive a liking for his flabby employer, although he was quite sure Blodgett wouldn't have bothered with him a moment if he hadn't been a prominent college man with such ties among the great as Blodgett hadn't been able to knot himself. What was more to the point, the stout man admired George's ambition. He was more generous with his surreptitious advice. He paid a larger salary which he admitted was less than George earned during that summer. George, therefore, went back to Princeton with fuller pockets. Again Mundy was loath to let him depart.

"You know more about this game than men who've worked at it for years."

His face of a parson grimaced.

"You'd soon be able to hire me, if you'd stick on the job instead of going back to college to get smashed up at football."

George, however, didn't suffer much damage that year. He played brilliantly through a season that without him would have been far more disastrous than it was.

When it was all over Squibs sat one night silently for a long time. At last he stirred, lighted his pipe, and spoke.

"I ought to say to you, George, that I was as satisfied with you in defeat as I was in victory."

"I outplayed Planter, anyway, didn't I?"

Bailly studied him.

"Did that mean more to you than having Princeton beaten?"

"It kept Princeton from being beaten worse than it was."

"Yes," Bailly admitted, "and, perhaps, you are right to find a personal victory somewhere in a general defeat."

"But you really think it selfish," George said.

"I wish," Bailly answered, "I could graft on your brain some of Allen's mental processes, even his dissatisfactions."

"You can't," George said, bluntly. "I'm tired of Allen's smash talk. Most people like him could be bought with the very conditions they attack."

Bailly arose and limped up and down. When he spoke his voice vibrated with an unaccustomed passion:

"I don't know. I don't think so. But I want you to realize that prostrate worship of the fat old god success is as wicked as any other idolatry. I want you to understand that Allen and his kind may be sincere and right, that a vision unblinded by the bull's-eye may see the target all awry. My fear goes back to your first days here. You are still ashamed of service."

"I've served," George said, hotly.

"Was it real service," Bailly asked gently, "or a shot at the bull's-eye?"

Almost involuntarily George clapped his fingers to his head.

"You're wrong, sir," he cried. "I've served when nothing but the thought of service brought me through."

Mrs. Bailly hurried in. She put one hand on George's shoulder. With the other she patted his hair.

"What's he scolding my boy for?"

George grinned at Bailly.

"Don't you see, sir, if I were as bad as you think she couldn't do that?"

Bailly nodded thoughtfully.

"If you've served as you say you must be merely hiding the good."

XXX

To himself at times George acknowledged his badness, in Bailly's terms at least. He sometimes sympathized with Allen's point of view, even while he heckled that angular man who often sat with him and Goodhue, talking about strikes, and violence, and drunkenness as the quickest recreation for men who had no time for play. He longed to tell Allen in justification that he had walked out of the working class himself. Later, staring at Sylvia's portrait, he would grow hard again. Men, he would repeat, wanted to smash down obstacles only because they didn't have the strength to scramble over. He had the strength. But Bailly would intrude again. What about the congenitally unsound?

"I'm not unsound," he would say to himself, studying the picture.

And he suspected that it was because he didn't want to be good that he was afraid of seeing too much of Betty Alston and her kindliness and the reminiscence of tears in her eyes. If Squibs only knew how blessedly easy it would be to turn good, to let ambition and Sylvia slip into a remote and ugly memory! More frequently now he stared at her portrait, forcing into his heart the thought of hatred and into her face the expression of it; for the more hatred there was between them, the smaller was the chance of his growing weak.

He longed for the approaching escape from his gravest temptation. When he was through college and definitely in New York he would find it simpler to be hard. For that matter, why should he grow weak? He had achieved a success far beyond the common. He would graduate president of his class, captain of the football team, although he had tried to throw both honours to Goodhue; member of the club that had drawn the best men of his year, a power in the Senior Council; the man who had done most for Princeton; a high-stand scholar; and, most important of all, one who had acquired with his education a certain amount of culture and an ease of manner in any company. Allen was still angular, as were most of those other men who had come here, like George, with nothing behind them.

In his success he saw no miracle, no luck beyond Squibs' early interest. What he had won he had applied himself to get with hardness, cold calculation, an indomitable will. He had kept his eyes open. He had used everybody, everything, to help him climb toward Sylvia out of the valley of humiliation. The qualities that had brought him all that were good qualities, worth clinging to. As he had climbed he would continue in spite of Bailly or Allen or Betty. But when he thought of Betty he had to fight the tears from his own eyes.

A little while before his graduation he went to her, knowing he must do something to make her less kind, to destroy the impression she gave him of one who, like Mrs. Bailly, always thought of him at his best.

He walked alone through a bland moonlight scented with honeysuckle from the hedges. His heart beat as it had that day four years ago when he had unintentionally let Sylvia know his presumptuous craving.

Two white figures strolled in front of the house. He went up, striving to overcome the absurd reluctance in his heart. It wasn't simple to destroy a thing as beautiful as this friendship. Betty paused and turned, drawing her mother around.

"I thought you'd quite forgotten us, George."

Nor did he want to kill the welcome in her voice.

"You're leaving Princeton very soon," Mrs. Alston said. "I'm glad you've come. Of course, it isn't to say good-bye."

He wondered if she didn't long for a parting to be broken only by occasional meetings in town. He wondered if she didn't fear for Betty. If there had been no Sylvia, if he had dared abandon the hard things and ask for Betty, this imperious woman would have put plenty of searching questions. But, he reflected, if it hadn't been for Sylvia he never would have come so far, never would have come to Betty. Every consideration held him on his course.

He feared that Mrs. Alston, in her narrow, careful manner, wouldn't give him an opportunity to speak to Betty alone. He was glad when they went in and found Mr. Alston, who liked and admired him. When he left there must come a chance. As he said good-night, indeed, Betty followed him to the hall, and he whispered, so that the servant couldn't hear:

"Betty, I've a confession. Won't you walk toward the gate with me?"

The colour entered her white face as she turned and called to her mother:

"I'll walk to the gate with George."

From the room he fancied a rustling, irritated acknowledgment.

But she came, throwing a transparent scarf over her tawny hair, and they were alone in the moonlight and the scent of flowers, walking side by side across grass, beneath the heavy branches of trees.

"See here, Betty! I've no business to call you that—never have had. Without saying anything I've lied to you ever since I've been in Princeton. I've taken advantage of your friendship."

She paused. The thick leaves let through sufficient light to show him the bewilderment in her eyes. Her voice was a little frightened.

"You can't make me believe that. You're not the sort of man that does such things. I don't know what you're talking about."

"Thanks," he said, "but you're wrong, and I can't go away without telling you just what I am."

"You're just—George Morton," she said with a troubled smile.

He tried not to listen. He hurried on with this killing that appealed to him as necessary.

"Remember the day in Freshman year, or before, wasn't it, when you recognized Sylvia Planter's bulldog? It was her dog. She had given him away—to me, because she had set him on me, and instead of biting he had licked my face. So she said to take him away because she could never bear to see him again."

Betty's bewilderment grew. She spoke gropingly.

"I guessed there had been something unusual between you and the Planters. What difference does it make? Why do you tell me now? Anything as old as that makes no difference."

"But it does," he blurted out. "I know you too well now not to tell you."

"But you and Lambert are good friends. You dance with Sylvia."

"And she," he said with a harsh laugh, "still calls me an impertinent servant."

Betty started. She drew a little away.

"What? What are you talking about?"

"Just that," he said, softly.

He forced himself to a relentless description of his father and mother, of the livery stable, of the failure, of his acceptance of the privilege to be a paid by the week guardian on a horse of the beautiful Sylvia Planter. The only point he left obscure was the sentimental basis of his quarrel with her.

"I was impertinent," he ended. "She called me an impertinent servant, a stable boy, other pleasant names. She had me fired, or would have, if I hadn't been going anyway. Now you know how I've lied to you and what I am!"

He waited, arms half raised, as one awaits an inevitable blow. For a minute she continued to stare. Then she stepped nearer. Although he had suffered to win an opposite response, she did what he had forced Lambert Planter to do.

"No wonder Lambert admires you," she said, warmly. "To do so much from such a beginning! I knew at first you were different from—from us. You're not now. It's——"

She broke off, drawing away a little again. He struggled to keep his hands from her white, slender figure, from her hair, yellow in the moonlight.

"You don't understand," he said, desperately. "This thing that you say I've become is only veneer. It may have thickened, but it's still veneer."

It hurt to say that more than anything else, for all along he had been afraid it was the truth.

"Underneath the veneer," he went on, "I'm the mucker, the stable boy if you like. If I were anything else I would have told you all this years ago. Betty! Betty!"

She drew farther away. He thought her voice was frightened, not quite clear.

"Please! Don't say anything more now. I'd rather not. I—I——Listen! What difference does it make to me or anybody where you came from? You're what you are, what you always have been since I've known you. It was brave to tell me. I know that. I'm going now. Please——"

She moved swiftly forward, stretching out her hand. He took it, felt its uncertain movement in his, wondered why it was so cold, tightened his grasp on its delightful and bewitching fragility. Her voice was uncertain, too. It caressed him as he unconsciously caressed her hand.

"Good-night, George."

He couldn't help holding that slender hand tighter. She swayed away, whispering breathlessly:

"Let me go now!"

He opened his fingers, and she ran lightly, with a broken laugh, across the lawn away from him.

The moonlight was like the half light of a breathless chapel, and the scent of flowers suggested death; yet he had not killed what he had come to kill.

When he couldn't see her white figure any more George Morton, greatest of football players, big man of his class, already with greedy fingers in the fat purse of Wall Street, flung himself on the thick grass and fought to keep his shoulders from jerking, his throat from choking, his eyes from filling with tears.

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