Once Stover had reconciled himself to the loss of a senior society election, he found ample compensation in the absolute liberty of action that came to him. It was not that he condemned this parent system; he believed in it as an honest attempt to reward the best in the college life, a sort of academic legion of honor, formed not on social cleavage, but given as a reward of merit. In his own case, he believed his own personal offending in the matter of Le Baron and Reynolds had been so extreme that nothing could counteract it.

So he gave himself up to the free and untrammelled delights of living his own life. His fierce stand for absolute democracy made of his rooms the ante-room of the class, through which all crowds seemed to pass, men of his own kind, socially calculating, glad to be known as the friends of Regan, Hungerford and Story, all rated sure men, and Stover, about whom they began to wonder more and more, as a unique and rebellious personality, which, contrary to precedent, had come to bear down all opposition. Gimbel and Hicks, elected managers for the coming year, came often, willing to conciliate the element they had fought, in the hopes of a favorable outcome on Tap Day. Men who worked their way dropped in often on Regan; Ricketts, with his drawling Yankee astuteness, always laughing up his sleeve; twenty odd, lonely characters, glad to sink into a quiet corner and listen to the furious discussions that raged about Brockhurst, Story and Regan.

It was seldom that Stover talked. He learned more by listening, by careful weighing of others' opinions, than in the attempt to classify his own thoughts through the medium of debate. At times when the discussion wandered from vital sources, he would ask a question, and these sharp, direct remarks had a pertinency and a searching trenchancy that sometimes upset an elaborate argument.

Regan brought him to the romance of commonplace things, to a genuine interest and study of political conditions; Brockhurst irritated and dissatisfied him, and so stimulated him to reading and self-analysis; Story, with his seriousness and fairness, recalled him always to a judicial point of view and an understanding of others; Hungerford, with his big, effusive nature, always dissatisfied and eager for realities, was akin to his own nature, and they grew into a confidential intimacy. In a community of splendid barbarians, their circle was exceptional, due to the pronounced individuality of their several rebellious minds.

Despite the abolition of the sophomore societies, other groups still maintained their exclusiveness, and kept alive the old antagonism, as the approach of Tap Day intensified the struggle for election and the natural campaigning of friend for friend.

As Brockhurst had prophesied, the chairmanship of the Lit Board went to Wiggin, a conscientious, thorough little plodder, who had never failed to hand in to each number his numerically correct quota of essays, two stories, a hammered-out poem and two painful portfolios.

On the night of the election, Stover heard from his room in Lyceum the familiar:

"Oh, you Dink Stover—stick out your head."

"Hello there, Brocky; come up," he said anxiously. "Who got it?"

"Wiggin, of course. Come on down, I want a ramble."

It was the first time that Brockhurst had shown a longing for companionship. Stover returned into the room, announcing:

"Poor old chap. Wiggin got it. Isn't it the devil?"

"Wiggin—oh, Lord!" said Regan.

"Why, he's not fit to tie Brocky's shoe-strings," said Hungerford, who fired a volley of soul-relieving oaths.

"I'm going down to bum around a bit with him," said Stover, slipping on his coat, "cheer the old boy up."

"Well, he knew it."

"Lots of difference that makes!"

Below Brocky, muffled to the ears, brim down, was whistling in unmusical enthusiasm.

"Hello, that you, Dink?" he said, breaking off. "Come on for a tramp."

At that age, being inexperienced, the undergraduate in questions of sympathy wisely returns to the instincts of the canine. Stover, without speaking, fell into his stride, and they swung off towards West Rock.

"Wiggin is the type of man," said Brockhurst, meditatively puffing his pipe, "that is the glorification of the commonplace. He is a sort of sublime earthworm, plodding along and claiming acquaintance with the rose because he travels around the roots. He is really by instinct a bricklayer, and the danger is that he may continue either in literature or some profession where the cry is for imagination."

"You could have beaten him out," said Stover, as a solace.

"And become an earthworm?" said Brockhurst. "The luck of it is, he made up his mind to heel the Lit. With his ideas he would have made leader of the glee club, president of the Phi Beta Kappa, chairman of the News, or what not."

"Still, give him credit," said Stover, smiling to himself, for he felt that he saw for the first time the human side of Brockhurst.

"I did; it was quite an amusing time."

"What happened?"

"Why, the little grubber came up to me and said, 'Brocky, old man, you ought to have had it.'"

"Why, that was rather decent," said Stover.

"Rubbish. All form," said Brockhurst impatiently. "Showed the calibre of his mind,—the obvious; nothing but the obvious. He thought it the thing to say, that's all."

"Well, what did you answer?" said Stover wondering.

"I said, 'Well, why didn't you vote for me then?'"

Stover burst out laughing, and Brockhurst, who had lost a coveted honor, was a little mollified by the tribute.

"Of course he stammered and looked annoyed—naturally; situation his imagination couldn't meet, so I said:

"'Come, Wiggin, no stuff and nonsense. You didn't think I ought to have it, and I know damn well, now that you've won out, you'll get a Skull and Bones to wear, pose in the middle of the photograph for the Banner, and be thoroughly satisfied at our board meeting to sit back and listen while I do the talking.'"

Stover broke into a laugh.

"Brocky, you scandalized him."

"Not at all. He thought I was joking—the last thing that occurs to the grubber is that wit is only a polite way of calling a man an ass."

"Brocky, you're at your best, don't stop."

Brockhurst smiled. It was turning a defeat into a victory. He continued:

"After all, Wiggy is interesting. I'll be revenged. I'll put him in a book some day. He represents a type—the mathematical mind, quantity not quality. He set out for the chairmanship as a man trains for a long-distance run. Do you know the truth? He rose every morning and took a cold shower, fifty swings to the left with the dumb-bell, fifty to the right, ate nothing heavy or starchy for his meals, walked the same distance each afternoon, and worked his two hours each night, hammering out divine literature."

"Oh, I say!" said Dink, a little in doubt.

Brockhurst began to laugh.

"He may have for all I know. Now I'll bury him. He will be eminently successful—I like that word eminently. You see he has no sense of humor, and especially no imagination to hinder him." Brockhurst, in one of his quixotic moods, began to gesture to the stars as he abandoned himself to the delights of his conceit. "Oh, that's a wonderful thing, to have no imagination—the saving of commonplace minds. If Wiggin had an imagination he would never have written a line, he would have perceived the immense distances that separated him from the Olympians. Instead he read Stevenson, Dumas, Kipling, and, unafraid, wrote little Stevenson echoes of Dumas, capsule Kiplings. He'll go out in the world, nothing will frighten him. He will rebel against nothing, for he hasn't an idea. He will choose the woman he needs for his needs, persuade himself that he's in love, and then persuade her. And he'll believe that's a virtuous marriage. He'll belong to the conservative party, the conservative church, and will be a distinguished subordinate, who will stand for tradition, institutions, and will be said to resemble some great man. Then he'll die, and will be pointed to as a great example. Requiescat in pace."

"Off with his head," said Stover appreciatively. "Now he's finished, own up, Brocky, that you are furious that you did not buckle down and beat him out."

"Of course I am—damn it," said Brockhurst. "I know I did right, but no one else will ever know it. And the strange thing is, Dink, the best thing for me is to have missed out."

"Why, in Heaven's name?"

"If I had made the chairmanship, I should probably be tapped for Bones—one of the successful. I might have become satisfied. Do you know that that is the great danger of this whole senior business?"

"What?"

"The fellow who wears his honors like a halo. He's made Bones or Keys, he's a success in life. Nothing more awaits him. 'I was it.'"

"Still, you would have liked it."

"Sure; I'm inconsistent," said Brocky, with a laugh. "It's only when I don't get what I want that my beautiful reason shows me I shouldn't have had it."

"Well, there's no danger of either of us disappearing under the halos," said Stover shortly.

"I'm not so sure about you," said Brockhurst.

The casual doubt aroused strange emotions in Stover.

"I thought you didn't believe in them," he said slowly.

"I don't. I don't believe in organizations, institutions, traditions—that's my point of view," said Brockhurst. "But then I'm in the world to be in revolt."

"You once spoke of the society system—the whole thing as it exists in America—" said Stover, "as a sort of idol worship. I never quite understood your meaning."

"Why, I think it's quite obvious," said Brockhurst surprised. "What was idol worship? A large body of privileged charlatans, calling themselves priests, impressed the masses with all the flummery of mysterious ceremonies, convenient voices issuing from caves or stone idols. What was an idol? An ordinary chunk of marble, let us say, issuing from the sculptor's chisel. When did it become sacred and awe-inspiring? When it had been placed in an inner shrine of shrines, removed from the public, veiled in shadows, obscured by incense, guarded by solicitous guards; the stone is still a stone but the populace is convinced. Look into a well in daylight—commonplace; look into it at night—a great mystery; black is never empty, the imagination fills it."

"How does this apply?" said Stover, impatiently.

"Cases are parallel. A group of us come together for the purpose of debate and discussion; no one notices it beyond a casual thought. Suddenly we surround ourselves with mystery, appear on the campus with a sensational pin stuck in our cravats, a bat's head or a gallows, and when, marvellously enough, some one asks us what the dickens we are wearing, we turn away; instantly it becomes known that something so deadly secret has begun that we have sworn to shed our heart's blood before we allow the holy, sacred name of Bat's Head or Gallow's Bird to pass our lips!"

"It's a little foolish, but what's the harm?"

"The harm is that this mumbo-jumbo, fee-fi-fo-fum, high cockalorum business is taken seriously. It's the effect on the young imagination that comes here that is harmful. Dink, I tell you, and I mean it solemnly, that when a boy comes here to Yale, or any other American college, and gets the flummery in his system, believes in it—surrenders to it—so that he trembles in the shadow of a tomblike building, doesn't dare to look at a pin that stares him in the face, is afraid to pronounce the holy, sacred names; when he's got to that point he has ceased to think, and no amount of college life is going to revive him. That's the worst thing about it all, this mental subjection which the average man undergoes here when he comes up against all this rigmarole of Tap Day, gloomy society halls, marching home at night, et cetera—et ceteray. By George, it is a return of the old idol-worship idea—thinking men in this twentieth century being impressed by the same methods that kept nations in servitude to charlatans three thousand years before. It's wrong, fundamentally wrong—it's a crime against the whole moving spirit of university history—the history of a struggle for the liberation of the human mind."

"But, Brocky, what would you have them do—run as open clubs?"

"Not at all," said Brockhurst. "I would strip them of all nonsense; in fact that is their weakness, not their strength, and it is all unnecessary. This is what I'd do: drop the secrecy—this extraordinary muffled breathless guarding of an empty can—retain the privilege any club has of excluding outsiders, stop this childishness of getting up and leaving the room if some old lady happens to ask are you a Bones man or a Keys man. Instead, when a Bones man goes to see a freshman whom he wants to befriend, have him say openly as he passes the chapter house:

"'That's my society—Skull and Bones. It stands as a reward of merit here. Hope you'll do something to deserve it.'

"Which is the better of the two ideas, the saner, the manlier and the more natural? What would they lose by eliminating the objectionable, unnecessary features—all of which you may be sure were started as horse play, and have curiously enough come to be taken in deadly earnestness?"

"I think you exaggerate a little," said Stover, unwilling to accept this arraignment.

"No, I don't," said Brockhurst stubbornly. "The thing is a fetish; it gets you; it's meant to get you. It gets me, and if you're honest you'll admit it gets you. Now own up."

"Yes, I suppose it does."

"Now, Dink, you're fighting for one thing up here, the freedom of your mind and your will."

"Why, yes," Stover said, surprised at Brockhurst's knowledge of his inner conflicts. "Yes, that's exactly what I'm fighting out."

"Well, my boy, you'll never get what you're after until you see this thing as it is—the unreasoning harm done, the poppycock that has been thrown around a good central idea—if you admit such things are necessary, which of course I don't."

"You see," said Stover stubbornly, "you're against all organization."

"I certainly am—inherited organizations," said Brockhurst immediately, "organizations that are imposed on you. The only organization necessary is the natural, spontaneous coming together of congenial elements."

They had returned to the campus, and Brockhurst, by intent leading the way, stopped before the lugubrious bulk of Skull and Bones.

"There you are," he said, with a laugh. "Look at it. It's built of the same stone as other buildings, it has in it what secret? Go up, young Egyptian, to its mystery in awe and reverence, young idol worshiper of thirty centuries ago."

"Damn it, Brocky, it does get me," said Stover with a short laugh.

"Curious," said Brockhurst, turning away. "The architecture of these sacred tombs is almost invariably the suggestion of the dungeon—the prison of the human mind."

Stover's conversation with Brockhurst did not at first trouble him much. Curiously enough the one idea he retained was that Brockhurst had spoken of him as a possibility for Tap Day.

"What nonsense," he said to himself angrily. "Here, I know better!"

But the next afternoon, the thought returning to him with pleasure, all at once, following a boyish whim, he passed into his old entry at Lawrence, and, going down a little guiltily into the region of the bath-tubs, came to the wall on which was inscribed the lists of his class.

On the Bones list, third from the top, the name Stover had been replaced and heavily underlined.

It gave him quite a thrill; something seemed to leap up inside of him, and he went out hastily. Then all at once he became angry. It was like opening up again a fight that had been fought and lost.

"What an ass I am," he said furiously. "The deuce of a chance I have to go Bones—with Reynolds and Le Baron. Can the leopard change his spots? About as much chance as a ki-yi has to go through a sausage machine and come out with a bark."

But, as he went towards Jean Story's home, thinking of her and what she would want, the force of what Brockhurst had said began to weaken.

"Brocky is impractical," he said artfully. "We must deal with things as they are, make the best of them. He exaggerates the effect on the imagination. At any rate, no one can accuse me of not taking a stand."

He saw the old colonial home, white and distinguished under the elms, and he said to himself, hoping against hope:

"If I were tapped—it would mean a good deal to her. I'll be darned if I'll let Brocky work me up. I'm not going up against anything more! I've done enough here."

He said it defiantly, for the courage of a man has two factors, his courage and the courage of the woman he loves.