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Title: The Guarded Heights

Author: Wadsworth Camp

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

Language: English

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

THE GUARDED HEIGHTS

BY WADSWORTH CAMP
FRONTISPIECE
BY C. D. MITCHELL

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

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO.

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

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

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

CONTENTS
PART I Oakmont
PART II Princeton
PART III The Market-Place
PART IV The Forest
PART V The New World

Books by Wadsworth Camp

THE GUARDED HEIGHTS

PART I
OAKMONT

I

George Morton never could be certain when he first conceived the
preposterous idea that Sylvia Planter ought to belong to him. The full
realization, at any rate, came all at once, unexpectedly, destroying his
dreary outlook, urging him to fantastic heights, and, for that matter, to
rather curious depths.
It was, altogether, a year of violent change. After a precarious survival of a
rural education he had done his best to save his father's livery business
which cheap automobiles had persistently undermined. He liked that, for he
had spent his vacations, all his spare hours, indeed, at the stable or on the
road, so that by the time the crash came he knew more of horses and rode
better than any hunting, polo-playing gentleman he had ever seen about that
rich countryside. Nor was there any one near his own age who could stand
up to him in a rough-and-tumble argument. Yet he wondered why he was
restless, not appreciating that he craved broader worlds to conquer. Then the
failure came, and his close relation with the vast Planter estate of Oakmont,
and the arrival of Sylvia, who disclosed such worlds and heralded the
revolution.
That spring of his twentieth year the stable and all its stock went to the
creditors, and old Planter bought the small frame house just outside the
village, on the edge of his estate, and drew his boundary around it. He was
willing that the Mortons should remain for the present in their old home at a
nominal rent, and after a fashion they might struggle along, for George's
mother was exceptionally clever at cleansing fine laces and linens; the
estate would have work for his father from time to time; as for himself,

Planter's superintendent suggested, there were new and difficult horses at
Oakmont and a scarcity of trustworthy grooms. George shook his head.
"Sure, I want a job," he admitted, "but not as old Planter's servant, or
anybody else's. I want to be my own boss."
George hadn't guessed that his reputation as a horseman had travelled as far
as the big house. The superintendent explained that it had, and that, living at
home, merely helping out for the summer, he would be quite apart from the
ordinary men around the stables. His parents sensed a threat. They begged
him to accept.
"We've got to do as Old Planter wants at the start or he'll put us out, and
we're too old to make another home."
So George went with his head up, telling himself he was doing Planter a
favour; but he didn't like it, and almost at once commenced to plan to get
away, if he could, without hurting his parents. Then Sylvia, just home from
her last year at school, came into the stable toward the end of his day's
work. Her overpowering father was with her, and her brother, Lambert, who
was about George's age. She examined interestedly the horse reserved for
her, and one or two others of which she was envious.
George wanted to stare at her. He had only glimpsed her casually and at a
distance in summers gone by. Now she was close, and he knew he had
never seen anything to match her slender, adolescent figure, or her finely
balanced face with its intolerant eyes and its frame of black hair.
"But," he heard her say to her father in a flexible contralto voice, "I don't
care to bother you or Lambert every time I want to ride."
An argument, unintelligible to George, flowed for a moment. Then Old
Planter's tones, bass and authoritative, filled the stable.
"Come here, young Morton!"
George advanced, not touching his cap, to remind the big man that there
was a difference between him and the other stable men, and that he didn't
like that tone.

"You are a very dependable horseman," the great millionaire said. "I can
trust you. When Miss Sylvia wants to ride alone you will go with her and
see that she has no accidents. During your hours here you will be entirely at
her disposal."
Instead of arousing George's anger that command slightly thrilled him.
"So you're Morton," Sylvia said, indifferently. "I shall expect you always to
be convenient."
He ventured to look at last, pulling off his cap.
"You can depend on it," he said, a trifle dazed by her beauty.
She went out. Her father and her brother followed, like servitors of a sort
themselves. George had no sense of having allowed his position there to be
compromised. He only realized that he was going to see that lovely creature
every day, would be responsible for her safety, would have a chance to
know her.
"A peach!" a groom whispered. "You're lucky, Georgie boy."
George shrugged his shoulders.
"Maybe so."
Yet he agreed. She was a peach, and he took no pains to conceal his
appraisal from his parents that evening.
"Seen Old Planter's daughter yet?"
His father, a drooping, tired figure in the dusk of the little porch, nodded.
"I haven't," his mother called from the kitchen. "Is she as pretty as she was
last summer?"
"Pretty!" he scoffed. "Who was the prettiest woman in the world?"
"I don't know," came the interested voice from the house. "Maybe the
Queen of Sheba."

"Then," George said, "she'd have cried her eyes out if she had seen Old
Planter's girl."
The elder Morton took his pipe from his mouth.
"Young men like you," he said, slowly, "haven't any business looking at
girls like Old Planter's daughter."
George laughed carelessly.
"Even a cat can look at a queen."
And during the weeks that followed he did look, too persistently, never
dreaming where his enthusiasm was leading him. Occasionally he would
bring her brother's horse around with hers or her father's. At such times he
would watch them ride away with a keen disappointment, as if he had been
excluded from a pleasure that had become his right. Lambert, however, was
away a good deal, and Old Planter that summer fought rheumatic attacks,
which he called gout, so that Sylvia, for the most part, rode alone through
remote bridle-paths with George at her heels like a well-trained animal.
He knew he could not alter that all at once; she would have it no other way.
She only spoke to him, really, about the condition of the horses, or the
weather—never a word conceivably personal; and every day he looked at
her more personally, let his imagination, without knowing it, stray too far.
At first he merely enjoyed being with her; then he appreciated that a sense
of intimacy had grown upon him, and he was troubled that she did not
reciprocate, that their extended companionship had not diminished at all the
appalling distance dividing them. There was something, moreover, beyond
her beauty to stimulate his interest. She appeared not to know fear, and once
or twice he ventured to reprove her, enjoying her angry reactions. She even
came to the stables, urging him to let her ride horses that he knew were not
safe.
"But you ride them," she would persist.
"When I find a horse I can't ride, Miss Sylvia, I guess I'll have to take up a
new line. If your father would come and say it's all right——"

Even then he failed to grasp the fact that he guarded her for his own sake
rather more than for her father's.
He nearly interfered when he heard her cry to her brother as they started off
one morning:
"I'm going to ride harder from now on, Lambert. I've got to get fit for next
winter. Coming out will take a lot of doing."
"If she rides any harder," he muttered, "she'll break her silly neck."
It angered him that she never spoke to him in that voice, with that easy
manner. Perhaps his eagerness to be near her had led her to undervalue him.
Somehow he would change all that, and he wanted her to stop calling him
"Morton," as if he had been an ordinary groom, or an animal, but he would
have to go slowly. Although he didn't realize the great fact then, he did
know that he shrank from attempting anything that would take her away
from him.
It was her harder riding, indeed, that opened his eyes, that ushered in the
revolution.
It happened toward the close of a mid-July afternoon. Mud whirled from
her horse's hoofs, plentifully sprinkling her humble guardian.
"Now what the devil's she up to?" he thought with a sharp fear.
She turned and rode at a gallop for a hedge, an uneven, thorny barrier that
separated two low meadows. He put spurs to his horse, shouting:
"Hold up, Miss Sylvia! That's a rotten take-off."
Flushed and laughing, she glanced over her shoulder.
"Got to try it to prove it, Morton."
He realized afterward that it was as near intimacy as she had ever come.
He saw her horse refuse, straightening his knees and sliding in the marshy
ground. He watched Sylvia, with an ease and grace nearly unbelievable,
somersault across the hedge and out of sight in the meadow beyond.

"Miss Sylvia! Are you hurt?"
No answer. He sprang from his horse, leaving it free to graze with hers. He
stormed through the hedge, his heart choking him. She lay on her side, quite
motionless, the high colour fled from her cheeks, her hair half down.
Although the soft ground should have reassured him he was obsessed by the
thought that she might never get up again.
In the warmth of his fear barriers were consumed. Within his horizon
survived just two people, himself and this silent object of an extended, if
unconscious, adoration.
He shrank from learning the truth, yet it was impossible to hesitate. He had
to do what he could.
He approached on tip-toe, knelt, and lifted her until she rested against him.
The contact was galvanic. He became aware of his trembling hands. Some
man, it occurred to him, would touch those curved, slightly parted lips. Not
if he knew it, unless it were himself! He wanted to hear those lips speak to
him as if he were a human being, and not just—Morton. How could he
dream of such things now? He fumbled for her pulse, failed at first to find
it, and became panic-stricken. He shook her, more than ever alone, facing
an irretrievable loss.
"Open your eyes," he begged wildly. "What's the matter with you? Oh, my
God, Miss Sylvia, I can't ever get along without you now."
He glanced haggardly around for water, any means to snatch her back; then
she stirred in his arms, and with his relief came a sickening return to a
peopled and ordered world. He understood he had sprung headlong with his
eyes shut; that his anxiety had dictated phrases he had had no business to
form, that he would not have uttered if she had been able to hear. Or, good
Lord! Had she heard? For she drew herself convulsively away, the colour
rushing back, her eyes opening, and they held a sort of horror.
"Are you hurt?" he said, trying to read her eyes.
She got to her knees, swaying a trifle.

"I remember. A bit of a fall. Stunned me. That's all. But you said something,
Morton! Will you please repeat that?"
Her eyes, and her voice, which had a new, frightening quality, stung his
quick temper. What he had suffered a moment ago was a little sacred. He
couldn't afford to let her cheapen it one cent's worth.
"I guess I don't need to repeat it," he said. "It was scared out of me, Miss
Sylvia, because I thought—I know it was silly—but I thought you were
dead. I never dreamed you could hear. I'll try to forget it."
He saw her grope in the wet grass at her knees. Scarcely understanding, he
watched her rise, lifting her riding crop, her face disclosing a temper to
match his own.
"You're an impertinent servant," she said. "Well, you'll not forget."
She struck at his face with the crop. He got his hand up just in time, and
caught her wrist.
"Don't you touch me," she whispered.
His jaw went out.
"You'll learn not to be afraid of my touch, and I'm not a servant. You get
that straight."
She struggled, but he held her wrist firmly. The sight of the crop, the
memory of her epithet, thickened his voice, lashed his anger.
"Have it your own way. You say I shan't forget, and I won't. I'm going after
you, and I usually get what I go after. You'll find I'm a human being, and I'd
like to see anybody hit me in the face and get away with it."
"Let me go! Let me go!"
He released her wrist, dragging the crop from her grasp. He snapped it in
two and flung the pieces aside. The slight noise steadied him. It seemed
symbolic of the snapping of his intended fate. She drew slowly back,
chafing the wrist he had held. Her face let escape the desire to hurt, to hurt
hard.

"Someone else will have the strength," she whispered. "You'll be punished,
you—you—stable boy."
She forced her way blindly through the hedge. Responding to his custom he
started automatically after her to hold her stirrup. She faced him, raising her
hands.
"Keep away from me, you beast!"
Unaided, she sprang into her saddle and started home at a hard gallop.
George glanced around thoughtfully. He was quite calm now. The familiar
landscape appeared strangely distorted. Was that his temper, or a reflection
from his altered destiny? He didn't know how the deuce he could do it, but
he was going to justify himself. Maybe the real situation had never been
explained to her, and, as the price of her companionship, he had, perhaps,
let her hold him too cheaply; but now he was going to show her that he was,
indeed, instead of a servant, a human being, capable of making his boasts
good.
He picked up the two pieces of her riding crop and thrust them into his
pocket. They impressed him as a necessary souvenir of his humiliation, a
reminder of what he had to do. She had hurt. Oh, Lord! How she had hurt!
He experienced a hot desire to hurt back. The scar could only be healed, he
told himself, if some day he could strike at her beautiful, contemptuous
body as hard as she had just now struck at him.

II

He mounted and pressed his horse, but he had only one or two glimpses of
Sylvia, far ahead, using her spurs, from time to time raising her hand as if
she had forgotten that her crop had been torn from her, broken, and thrown
aside.
Such frantic haste was urged by more than the necessity of escape. What
then, if not to hasten his punishment, to tell her father, her mother, and
Lambert? She had threatened that someone else would have the strength to
give him a thrashing. Probably Lambert. Aside from that how could they
punish a man who had only committed the crime of letting a girl know that

he loved her? All at once he guessed, and he laughed aloud. They could
kick him out. He wanted, above everything else, to be kicked out of a job
where he was treated like a lackey, although he was told he was nothing of
the kind. Expert with horses, doing Old Planter a favour for the summer!
Hadn't she just called him a servant, a stable boy? He wanted to put himself
forever beyond the possibility of being humiliated in just that way again.
In the stable he found a groom leading Sylvia's horse to a stall.
"Take mine, too, and rub him down, will you?"
The groom turned, staring.
"The nerve! What's up, George?"
"Only," George said, deliberately, "that I've touched my last horse for
money."
"Say! What goes on here? The young missus rides in like a cyclone, and
looking as if she'd been crying. I always said you'd get in trouble with the
boss's daughter. You're too good looking for the ladies, Georgie——"
"That's enough of that," George snapped. "Scrape him down, and I'll be
much obliged."
He went out, knowing that the other would obey, for as a rule people did
what George wanted. He took a path through the park toward home,
walking slowly, commencing to appreciate the difficulties he had brought
upon himself. His predicament might easily involve his parents. The
afternoon was about done, they would both be there, unsuspecting. It was
his duty to prepare them. He experienced a bitter regret as he crossed the
line that a few months ago had divided their property, their castle, from
Oakmont. Now Old Planter could cross that line and drive them out.
Before George came in sight of the house he heard a rubbing, slapping
noise, and with a new distaste pictured his mother bending over a washtub,
suggesting a different barrier to be leaped. As he entered the open space
back of the house he wanted to kick the tub over, wanted to see sprawling in
the dirt the delicate, intimate linen sent down weekly from the great house
because his mother was exceptionally clever with such things. To the

uncouth music of her labour her broad back rose and bent rhythmically. His
father, wearing soiled clothing, sat on the porch steps, an old briar pipe in
his mouth.
Abruptly his mother's drudgery ceased. She stared. His father rose stiffly.
"You've got yourself in trouble," he said.
George had not fancied the revolution had unfurled banners so easily
discernible. He became self-conscious. His parents' apprehension made
matters more difficult for him. They, at least, were too old to revolt.
"I suppose I have," he acknowledged shortly.
His father used the tone of one announcing an unspeakable catastrophe.
"You mean you've had trouble with Miss Sylvia."
"George!" his mother cried, aghast. "You've never been impertinent with
Miss Sylvia!"
"She thinks I have," George said, "so it amounts to the same thing."
His father's face twitched.
"And you know Old Planter can put us out of here without a minute's
notice, and where do you think we'd go? How do you think we'd get bread
and butter? You talk up, young man. You tell us what happened."
"I can't," George said, sullenly. "I can't talk about it. You'll hear soon
enough."
"I always said," his mother lamented, "that Georgie wasn't one to know his
place up there."
"Depends," George muttered, "on what my place is. I've got to find that out.
Look! You'll hear now."
A bald-headed figure in livery, one of the house servants, glided toward
them through the shrubbery, over that vanished boundary line, with nervous
haste. George squared his shoulders. The messenger, however, went straight
to the older man.

"Mr. Planter's on his ear, and wants to see you right off in the library. What
you been up to, young Morton?"
George resented the curiosity in the pallid, unintelligent eyes, the fellow's
obvious pleasure in the presence of disaster. It would have appeased him to
grasp those sloping shoulders, to force the grinning face from his sight. A
queer question disturbed him. Had Sylvia felt something of the sort about
him?
"Come on," the elder Morton said. "It's pretty hard at my age. You'll pay for
this, George."
"Old Planter would never be that unfair," George encouraged him.
"Georgie! Georgie!" his mother said when the others were out of sight,
"what have you been up to?"
He walked closer and placed his arm around her shoulders.
"I've been getting my eyes opened," he answered. "I never ought to have
listened to them. I never ought to have gone up there. I did say something to
Miss Sylvia I had no business to. If I'd been one of her own kind, instead of
the son of a livery stable keeper, I'd have got polite regrets or something. It's
made me realize how low I am."
"No," she said with quick maternal passion. "You're not low. Maybe some
day those people'll be no better than we are."
He shook his head.
"I'd rather I was no worse than they are. And I will be. I won't put up with
it. If some people have to be treated like dirt, I'm going to help do the
treating."
"That's no right way of thinking," she warned. "It's money makes the mare
go."
But in Sylvia's case, George admitted, there was other propulsion than that;
something more fragile, and harder to understand or capture for one's self.
"Don't you worry, I'll make money," he said.

She glanced up quickly.
"Who's that?"
A brisk masculine voice volleyed through the shrubbery:
"Young Morton! I say, young Morton!"
"It's Mr. Lambert," she breathed. "Go quick."
George remembered what Sylvia had said about someone else having the
strength.
"Can't you guess, Ma, what the young lady's brother wants of me?"
The bitterness left his face. His smile was engaging.
"To give me the devil."
"Young Morton! Young Morton!"
"Coming!" he called.
"George," she begged, "don't have any trouble with Mr. Lambert."

III

She watched him with anxious eyes, failing to observe, because she was his
mother, details that informed his boasts with power. His ancestry of labour
had given him, at least, his straight, slender, and unusually muscular body,
and from somewhere had crept in the pride, just now stimulated, with which
he carried it. His wilful, regular features, moreover, guarded by youth, were
still uncoarsened.
He found Lambert Planter waiting beyond the old boundary behind a screen
of bushes, his hands held behind his back. In his face, which had some of
Sylvia's beauty, hardened and enlarged, dwelt the devil George had
foreseen.
George nodded, feeling all at once at ease. He could take care of himself in
an argument with Lambert Planter. No such distances separated them as had

widened beyond measure a little while back between him and Sylvia. He
wondered if that conception sprang from Lambert, or if it came simply from
the fact that they were two men, facing each other alone; for it was from the
first patent that Sylvia had asked her brother to complete a punishment she
had devised as fitting, but which she had been incapable of carrying out
herself. Lambert, indeed, brought his hands forward, disclosing a whip. It
was a trifle in his way as he took off his coat.
"That's right," George said. "Make yourself comfortable."
"You won't help matters by being impertinent, Morton."
Lambert's voice contrasted broadly with George's round, loud tones. While,
perhaps, not consciously affected, its accents fell according to the custom of
the head master of a small and particular preparatory school. George
crushed his instinct to mock. What the deuce had he craved ever since his
encounter with Sylvia unless it was to be one with men like Lambert
Planter? So all he said was:
"What's the whip for?"
"You know perfectly well," Lambert answered. "There's no possible excuse
for what you said and did this afternoon. I am going to impress that on
you."
"You mean you want a fight?"
"By no means. I wouldn't feel comfortable fighting a man like you. I'd
never dreamed we had such a rotten person on the place. Oh, no, Morton.
I'm going to give you a good horse-whipping."
George's chin went out. His momentary good-humour fled.
"If you touch me with that whip I'm likely to kill you."
Without hesitating Lambert raised the whip. George sprang and got his
hands on it, intent only on avoiding a blow that would have carried the
same unbearable sting as Sylvia's riding crop. Such tactics took Lambert by
surprise. George's two hands against his one on the stock were victorious.
The whip flew to one side. Lambert, flushing angrily, started after it.
George barred his path, raising his fists.

"You don't touch that thing again."
Lambert's indecision, his hands hanging at his sides, hurt George nearly as
much as the lashing would have done. He had to destroy that attitude of
sheer superiority.
"I'm not sure you're a man," he said, thickly, "but you tried to hit me, so you
can put your pretty hands up or take it in the face."
He aimed a vicious blow. Lambert side-stepped and countered. George's ear
rang. He laughed, his self-respect rushing back with the keen joy of battle.
In Lambert's face, stripped of its habitual repression, he recognized an equal
excitement. It was a man's fight, with blood drawn at the first moment,
staining both of them. Lambert boxed skillfully, and his muscles were hard,
but after the first moment George saw victory, and set out to force it. He
looked for fear in the other's eyes then, and longed to see it, but those eyes
remained as unafraid as Sylvia's until there wasn't left in them much of
anything conscious. As a last chance Lambert clinched, and they went
down, fighting like a pair of furious terriers. George grinned as he felt those
eclectic hands endeavouring in the most brotherly fashion to torture him.
He managed to pin them to the ground. He laughed happily.
"Thought you hated to touch me."
"You fight like a tiger, anyway," Lambert gasped.
"Had enough?"
Lambert nodded.
"I know when I'm through."
George didn't release him at once. His soul expanded with a sense of power
and authority earned by his own effort. It seemed an omen. It urged him too
far.
"Then," he mused, "I guess I'd better let you run home and tell your father
what I've done to you."
"That," Lambert said, "proves I was right, and I'm sorry I fought you."

George tried to think. He felt hot and angry. Was the other, after all, the
better man?
"I take it back," he muttered. "Ought to have had enough sense to know that
a fellow that fights like you's no tattle-tale."
"Thanks, Morton."
George's sense of power grew. He couldn't commence too soon to use it.
"See here, Mr. Planter, I came up here to help with some horses your people
didn't know how to handle, and let myself get shifted to this other job; but
I'm not your father's slave, and anyway I'm getting out."
He increased the pressure on Lambert's arms.
"Just to remind you what we've been fighting about, and that I'm not your
slave, you call me Mr. Morton, or George, just as if I was about as good as
you."
Lambert smiled broadly.
"Will you kindly let me go—George?"
George sprang up, grinning.
"How you feel, Mr. Lam——" He caught himself—"Mr. Planter?"
Lambert struggled to his feet.
"Quite unwell, thanks. I'm sorry you made such a damned fool of yourself
this afternoon. We might have had some pretty useful times boxing
together."
"I'd just as leave tell you," George said, glancing away, "that I never
intended to say it. I didn't realize it myself until it was scared out of me."
Lambert put on his coat.
"It won't bear talking about."
"It never hit me," George said, huskily, "that even a cat couldn't look at a
queen."

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

IV

George went, obliterating as best he could the souvenirs of battle. Water,
unfortunately, was a requisite, and the nearest was to be found at his own
home. His mother gasped.
"You did! After what I said!"
At the pump he splashed cold water over his face and arms.
"I thrashed him," he spluttered.
"I guess that settles it for your father and me."
"Young Planter won't tell anybody," George assured her. "Although I don't
see how he's going to get away with it unless he says he was run over by an
automobile and kicked by a mule."
"What's come over you?" she demanded. "You've gone out of your head."
He dodged her desire for details. As Lambert had said, the thing wouldn't
bear talking about. For the first time in his life he stood alone, and whatever
he accomplished from now on would have to be done alone.
He saw his father striding toward them, the anxious light gone from his
eyes. George experienced a vast relief.
"Father looks a little more cheerful," he commented, drying his face.
"Get supper, Ma," the man said as he came up.
She hesitated, held by her curiosity, while he turned on George.
"I don't wonder you couldn't open your mouth to me. You're to be out of
here to-morrow."
"I'd made up my mind to that."
"And Old Planter wants to see you at nine o'clock to-night."

"Since you and Ma," George said, "seem on such good terms with him I
suppose I'll have to go."
"Thank the Lord we are," his father grumbled. "I wouldn't have blamed him
if he had packed us all off. He was more than fair. I've looked after you so
far, but you'll have to shift for yourself now."
"And the only thing I didn't like about it," George mused, "was leaving you
and Ma."
"What did he say to Miss Sylvia?" his mother whispered.
"Said he couldn't get along without her, and was going to have her."
He might have been speaking of one who had ventured to impersonate the
deity.
"And he touched her! Put his arms around her!"
The horror in his mother's face grew.
"Georgie! Georgie! What could you have been thinking of?"
He leaned against the pump.
"I'm thinking now," he said, softly, "it's sort of queer a man's father and
mother believe there's any girl in the world too good for their son."
"Lots of them," his father snapped. "Sylvia Planter most of all."
"Oh, yes," his mother agreed.
He straightened.
"Then listen," he said, peremptorily. "I don't think so. I told her I was going
to have her, and I will. Just put that down in your books. I'll show the lot of
you that I'm as good as she is, as good as anybody."
The late sun illuminated the purpose in his striking face.
"Impertinent servant!" he cried. "Stable boy! Beast! It's pretty rough to
make her marry all that. It's my only business from now on."

V

He went to his room, leaving his parents aghast. With a nervous hurry he rid
himself of his riding breeches, his puttees, his stock.
"That," he told himself, "is the last time I shall ever wear anything like
livery."
When he had dressed in one of his two suits of ordinary clothing he took the
broken riding crop and for a long time stared at it as though the venomous
souvenir could fix his resolution more firmly. Once his hand slipped to the
stock where Sylvia's fingers had so frequently tightened. He snatched his
hand away. It was too much like an unfair advantage, a stolen caress.
"Georgie! Georgie!"
His mother's voice drifted to him tentatively.
"Come and get your supper."
He hid the broken crop and went out. His father glanced disapproval.
"You'd do better to wear Old Planter's clothes while you can. It's doubtful
when you'll buy any more of your own."
George sat down without answering. Since his return from the ride that
afternoon his parents and he had scarcely spoken the same language, and by
this time he understood there was no possible interpreter. It made him choke
a little over his food.
The others were content to share his silence. His father seemed only
anxious to have him away; but his mother, he fancied, looked at him with
something like sorrow.
Afterward he fled from that nearly voiceless scrutiny and paced one of the
park paths, counting the minutes until he could answer Old Planter's
summons. He desired to have the interview over so that he could snap every
chain binding him to Oakmont, every chain save the single one Sylvia's
contempt had unwittingly forged. He could not, moreover, plan his

immediate future with any assurance until he knew what the great man
wanted.
"Only to make me feel a little worse," he decided. "What else could he do?"
What, indeed, could a man of Planter's wealth and authority not do? It was a
disturbing question.
Through the shrubbery the lights of the house gleamed. The moonlight
outlined the immense, luxurious mass. Never once had he entered the great
house. He was eager to study the surrounding in which women like Sylvia
lived, which she, to an extent, must reflect.
In that serene moonlight he realized that his departure, agreeable and
essential as it was, would make it impossible for him during an indefinite
period to see that slender, adolescent figure, or the features, lovely and
intolerant, that had brought about this revolution in his life. He
acknowledged now that he had looked forward each day to those hours of
proximity and contemplation; and there had been from the first, he guessed,
adoration in his regard.
It was no time to dwell on the sentimental phase of his situation. He
despised himself for still loving her. His approaching departure he must
accept gladly, since he designed it as a means of coming closer—close
enough to hurt.
He wondered if he would have one more glimpse of her, perhaps in the
house. He glanced at his watch. He could go at last. He started for the
lights. Would he see her?
At the corner of the building he hesitated before a fresh dilemma. His
logical entrance lay through the servants' quarters, but he squared his
shoulders and crossed the terrace. It was impossible now that he should ever
enter the house in which she lived by the back door.
It was a warm night, so the door stood open. The broad spaces of the hall,
the rugs, the hangings, the huge chairs, the portraits in gilt frames against
polished walls, the soft, rosy light whose source he failed to explore,
seemed mutely to reprove his presumption.

He rang. He did not hear the feet of the servant who answered. The vapid
man that had trotted for his father that afternoon suddenly shut off his view.
"You must wear rubbers," George said.
"What you doing here? Go 'round to the back."
"Mr. Planter," George explained, patiently, "sent for me."
"All right. All right. Then go 'round to the back where you belong."
George reached out, caught the other's shoulder, and shoved him to one
side. While the servant gave a little cry and struggled to regain his balance,
George walked in. A figure emerged painfully from an easy chair in the
shadows by the fireplace.
"What's all this, Simpson?"
The polished voice gave the impression of overcoming an impediment,
probably a swollen lip.
"It's young Morton, Mr. Lambert," Simpson whined. "I told him to go to the
back door where he belongs."
"What an idea!" Lambert drawled. "Enter, Mr. Morton. My dear Mr.
Morton, what is the occasion? What can we do for you? I must beg you to
excuse my appearance. I had a trifling argument with my new hunter this
afternoon."
George grinned.
"Must be some horse."
None the less, he felt a bruise. It would have been balm to destroy
Lambert's mocking manner by a brusque attack even in this impressive hall.
"Your father sent for me."
"Shall I put him out, sir?" Simpson quavered.
Lambert burst into a laugh.

"I shouldn't try it. We can't afford too many losses in one day. Go away,
Simpson, and don't argue with your betters. You might not be as clever as I
at explaining the visible results. I'll take care of Mr. Morton."
Simpson was bewildered.
"Quite so, sir," he said, and vanished.
"My father," Lambert said, "is in the library—that first door. Wait. I'll see if
he's alone."
Painfully he limped to the door and opened it, while George waited,
endeavouring not to pull at his cap.
"Father," Lambert said, smoothly, "Mr. Morton is calling."
A deep voice, muffled by distance, vibrated in the hall.
"What are you talking about?"
Lambert bowed profoundly.
"Mr. Morton from the lodge."
George stepped close to him.
"Want me to thrash you again?"
Lambert faced him without panic.
"I don't admit that you could, but, my dear—George, I'm too fatigued to-
night to find out. Some day, if the occasion should arise, I hope I may. I do
sincerely."
He drew the door wide open, and stepped aside with a bow that held no
mockery. A white-haired, stately woman entered the hall, and, as she
passed, cast at George a glance curiously lacking in vitality. In her George
saw the spring of Sylvia's delicacy and beauty. Whatever Old Planter might
be this woman had something from the past, not to be acquired, with which
to endow her children. George resented it. It made the future for him appear
more difficult. Her voice was in keeping, cultured and unaffected.

"Mr. Planter is alone, Morton. He would like to see you."
She disappeared in a room opposite. George took a deep breath.
"On that threshold," Lambert said, kindly, "I've often felt the same way,
though I've never deserved it as you do."
George plunged through and closed the door.
The room was vaster than the hall, and darker, impressing him confusedly
with endless, filled book-shelves; with sculpture; with a difficult maze of
furniture. The only light issued from a lamp on a huge and littered table at
the opposite end.
At first George glanced vainly about, seeking the famous man.
"Step over here, Morton."
There was no denying that voice. It came from a deep chair whose back was
turned to the light. It sent to George's heart his first touch of fear. He walked
carefully across the rugs and around the table until he faced the figure in the
chair. He wanted to get rid of his cap. He couldn't resist the temptation to
pull at it; and only grooms and stable boys tortured caps.
The portly figure in evening clothes was not calculated to put a culprit at
ease. Old Planter sat very straight. The carefully trimmed white side
whiskers, the white hair, the bushy brows above inflamed eyes, composed a
portrait suggestive of a power relentless and not to be trifled with. George
had boasted he was as good as any one. He knew he wasn't as good as Old
Planter; their disparity of attainment was too easily palpable. No matter
whether Old Planter's success was worthy, he had gone out into the world
and done things. He had manipulated railroads. He had piled up millions
whose number he couldn't be sure of himself. He had built this house and
all it stood for. What one man had done another could. George stopped
pulling at his cap. He threw it on the table as into a ring. His momentary
fear died.
"You sent for me, sir."
The mark of respect flowed naturally. This old fellow was entitled to it,
from him or any one else.

The bass voice had a dynamic quality.
"I did. This afternoon you grossly and inexcusably insulted my daughter. It
will be necessary to speak of her to you just once more. That's why I told
your father to send you. If I were younger it would give me pleasure to
break every bone in your body."
The red lips opened and shut with the precision of a steel trap. They
softened now in a species of smile.
"I see, Morton, you had a little argument with a horse this afternoon."
George managed to smile back.
"Nothing to speak of, sir."
"I wish it had been. I take a pleasure in punishing you. It isn't biblical, but
it's human. I'm only sorry I can't devise a punishment to fit the crime."
"It was no crime," George said bravely, "no insult."
"Keep your mouth shut. Unfortunately I can't do much more than run you
away from here, for I don't care to evict your parents from their home for
your folly; and they do not support you. Mr. Evans will pay you off in the
morning with a month's extra wages."
"I won't take a cent I haven't earned," George said.
Old Planter studied him with more curiosity.
"You're a queer livery stable boy."
"I'm banking on that," George said, willing the other should make what he
would of it.
"It's there if you wish it," Old Planter went on. "I sent for you so that I
could tell you myself that you will be away from Oakmont and from the
neighbourhood by noon to-morrow. And remember your home is now a
portion of Oakmont. You will never come near us again. You will forget
what happened this afternoon."

He stood up, his face reddening. George wanted to tell him that Sylvia
herself had said he shouldn't forget.
"If, Morton," the old man went on with a biting earnestness, "once you're
away from Oakmont, you ever bother Miss Sylvia again, or make any
attempt to see her, I'll dispossess your parents, and I'll drive you out of any
job you get. I'll keep after you until you'll understand what you're defying.
This isn't an idle threat. I have the power."
The father completely conquered him. He clenched his knotted fists.
"I'd destroy a regiment of creatures like you to spare my little girl one of the
tears you caused her this afternoon."
"After all," George said, defensively, "I'm a human being."
Old Planter shook his head.
"If your father hadn't failed you'd have spent your life in a livery stable. It
takes education, money, breeding to make a human being."
George nodded. He wouldn't need to plan much for himself, after all.
Sylvia's father was doing it for him.
"I've heard some pretty hard words to-day, sir," he said. "It's waked me up.
Can't a man get those things for himself?"
He fancied reminiscence in Old Planter's eyes.
"The right kind can. Get out of here now, Morton, and don't let me see you
or hear of you again."
George stepped between him and the table to pick up his cap. His nerves
tightened. Close to his cap lay an unmounted photograph, not very large, of
Sylvia. What a companion piece for the broken crop! What an ornament for
an altar dedicated to ambition, to anger, and to love! He would take it under
her father's nose, following her father's threats.
He slipped his cap over the photograph, and picked up both, the precious
likeness hidden by the cheap cloth.
"Good-night, sir."

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

VI

Lambert, hands in pockets, stopped him in the hall.
"Packed off, as you deserve, but you'll need money."
"Thanks," George said. "I don't want any I don't earn."
"If father should kick me out," Lambert drawled, "I'd be inclined to take
what I could get."
"I'd rather steal," George said.
Lambert smiled whimsically.
"A word of advice. Stealing's dangerous unless you take enough."
George indicated the library door. He tried to imitate Lambert's manner.
"Then I suppose it's genius."
"What are you getting at?"
"I mean," George said, "you people may drive me to stealing, but it'll be the
kind you get patted on the back for."
"Sounds like Wall Street," Lambert smiled.
George wanted to put himself on record in this house.
"I'm going to make money, and don't you forget it."
Lambert's smile widened.
"Then good luck, and a good job—George."
George crushed his helpless irritation, turned, and walked out the front
door; more disappointed than he would have thought possible, because he

had failed to see Sylvia.
Reluctantly he returned to the nearly silent discomfort of his parents. He
tried to satisfy their curiosity.
"Nothing but threats. I'm to be driven to crime if I'm ever heard of after I
leave Oakmont in the morning."
"He might have made it worse," his father grunted.
The conversation died for lack of an interpreter.
His father made a pretence of reading a newspaper. His mother examined
her swollen hands. Her eyes suggested the nearness of tears. George got up.
"I suppose I'd better be getting ready."
As he stooped to kiss her his mother slipped an arm around his neck.
"Mother's little boy."
George steadied his voice.
"Good-night, Dad."
His father filled his pipe reflectively.
"Good-night, George."
No word of sympathy; no sympathy at all, beyond a fugitive, half-
frightened hint from his mother, because he had run boldly against a fashion
of thinking; little more, really.
He softly closed the door of his room, the last time he would ever do that!
He sat on the edge of the bed. He took Sylvia's photograph from his pocket
and studied it with a deliberate lack of sentiment. He fancied her desirable
lips framing epithets of angry contempt and those other words to which he
had given his own significance.
"You'll not forget."
He looked so long, repeating it in his mind so often, that at last his eyes
blurred, and the pictured lips seemed, indeed, to curve and straighten.

"You'll not forget."
He tapped the photograph with his forefinger.
"You're going to help me remember," he muttered. "I'll not forget."

VII

He placed the photograph and the broken crop at the bottom of his oilcloth
suitcase. The rest of his packing was simple; he had so little that was
actually his own. There were a few books on a shelf, relics of his erratic
attendance at the neighbouring high school—he regretted now that his
ambition there had been physical rather that mental. Even in the
development of his muscles, however, his brain had grown a good deal, for
he was bright enough. If he made himself work, drawing on what money he
had, he might get ready for college by fall. He had always envied the boys,
who had drifted annually from the high school to the remote and
exhilarating grandeur of a university.
What had Old Planter's sequence been? Education, money, breeding. Of
course. And he guessed that the three necessities might, to an extent, walk
hand in hand. The acquisition of an education would mean personal
contacts, helpful financially, projecting, perhaps, that culture that he felt
was as essential as the rest. Certainly the starting place for him was a big
university where a man, once in, could work his way through. Lambert
went to Yale. Harvard sprang into his mind, but there was the question of
railroad fare and lost time. He'd better try his luck at Princeton which wasn't
far and which had, he'd heard, a welcome for boys working their way
through college.
He examined his bank book. Fortunately, since he had lived with his
parents, he had had little opportunity or need for spending. The balance
showed nearly five hundred dollars, and he would receive fifty more in the
morning. If he could find someone to bolster up his insufficient schooling
for a part of that amount he'd make a go of it; he'd be fairly on his course.
He went to bed, but he slept restlessly. He wanted to be away from
Oakmont and at work. Through his clouded mind persisted his desire for a

parting glimpse of Sylvia. If he slept at all it was to the discordant memory
of her anger.
The sun smiled into his room, summoning him to get up and go forth.
His father was not there. As if to emphasize the occasion, his mother
deserted her washtub, served his breakfast herself, stood about in helpless
attitudes.
"George," she whispered, toward the close of the desolate meal, "try to get a
job near here. Of course you could never come home, but we could go to
see you."
"Father," he said, "is kicking me out as much as Old Planter is, and you
back him up."
She clasped her hands.
"I've got to. And you can't blame your father. He has to look after himself
and me."
"It makes no difference. I'm not going to take a job near by," he said.
"Where are you going?" she asked, sharply.
He stared at her for a moment, profoundly sorry for her and for himself.
"I'm going to get away from everything that would remind me I've ever
been treated like something less than human."
She gave a little cry.
"Then say good-bye, my son, before your father comes back."

VIII

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

"I'm off," he said, trying to make his voice cheery.
His father considered his cold pipe. He held out his hand.
"It's a bad start, but maybe you'll turn out all right after all."
George smiled his confidence.
"Well, let us hear from you," his father went on, "although as things are I
don't see how I could help you much."
"Don't worry," George said.
He walked to his mother, who had returned to her work. He kissed her
quickly, saying nothing, for he saw the tears falling from her cheeks to the
dirty water out of which linen emerged soft and immaculate. He strode
toward the main driveway.
"Good-bye," he called quickly.
The renewed racket at the tub pursued him until he had placed a screen of
foliage between himself and the little house. His last recollection of home,
indeed, was of swollen hands and swollen eyes, and of clean, white tears
dropping into offensive water.
He got his money and walked past the great house and down the driveway.
He would not see home again. At a turn near the gate he caught his breath,
his eyes widening. The vague chance had after all materialized. Sylvia
walked briskly along, accompanied by a vicious-looking bulldog on a leash.
Her head was high and her shoulders square, as she always carried them.
Her eyes sparkled. Then she saw George, and she paused, her expression
altering into an active distaste, her cheeks flushing with tempestuous colour.
"I can't go back now," George thought.
She seemed to visualize all that protected her from him. He put his cheap
suitcase down.
"I'm glad I saw you," he said, deliberately. "I wanted to thank you for
having me fired, for waking me up."

She didn't answer. She stood quite motionless. The dog growled, straining
at his leash toward the man in the road.
"I've been told to get out and stay out," he went on, his temper lashed by her
immobility. "You know I meant what I said yesterday when I thought you
couldn't hear. I did. Every last word. And you might as well understand now
I'll make every word good."
He pointed to the gate.
"I'm going out there just so I can come back and prove to you that I don't
forget."
Her colour fled. She stooped swiftly, gracefully, and unleashed the anxious
bulldog.
"Get him!" she whispered, tensely.
Like a shot the dog sprang for George. He caught the animal in his arms and
submitted to its moist and eager caresses.
"It's a mistake," he pointed out, "to send a dog that loves the stables after a
stable boy."
He dropped the dog, picked up his suitcase, and started down the drive. The
dog followed him. He turned.
"Go back, Roland!"
Sylvia remained crouched. She cried out, her contralto voice crowded with
surprise and repulsion:
"Take him with you. I never want to see him again."
So, followed by the dog, George walked bravely out into the world through
the narrow gateway of her home.

PART II
PRINCETON

I

"Young man, you've two years' work to enter."
"Just when," George asked, "does college open?"
"If the world continues undisturbed, in about two months."
"Very well. Then I'll do two years' work in two months."
"You've only one pair of eyes, my boy; only one brain."
George couldn't afford to surrender. He had arrived in Princeton the evening
before, a few hours after leaving Oakmont. It had been like a crossing
between two planets. Breathlessly he had sought and found a cheap room in
a students' lodging house, and afterward, guided by the moonlight, he had
wandered, spellbound, about the campus.
Certainly this could not be George Morton, yesterday definitely divided
from what Old Planter had described as human beings. His exaltation grew.
For a long time he walked in an amicable companionship of broader spaces
and more arresting architecture than even Oakmont could boast; and it
occurred to him, if he should enter college, he would have as much share in
all this as the richest student; at Princeton he would live in the Great House.
His mood altered as he returned to his small, scantily furnished room whose
very unloveliness outlined the difficulties that lay ahead.
He unpacked his suitcase and came upon Sylvia's photograph and her
broken riding crop. In the centre of the table, where he would work, he

placed the photograph with a piece of the crop on either side. Whenever he
was alone in the room those objects would be there, perpetual lashes to
ambition; whenever he went out he would lock them away.
How lovely and desirable she was! How hateful! How remote! Had ever a
man such a goal to strain for? He wanted only to start.
Immediately after breakfast the next morning he set forth. He had never
seen a town so curiously empty. There were no students, since it was the
long vacation, except a few backward men and doubtful candidates for
admission. He stared by daylight at the numerous buildings which were
more imposing now, more suggestive of learning, wealth, and breeding.
They seemed to say they had something for him if only he would fight hard
enough to receive it.
First of all, he had to find someone who knew the ropes. There must be
professors here, many men connected with this gigantic plant. On Nassau
Street he encountered a youth, a little younger than himself, who, with a
bored air, carried three books under his arm. George stopped him.
"I beg your pardon. Are you going here?"
The other looked him over as if suspecting a joke.
"Going where?" he asked, faintly.
George appraised the fine quality of the young man's clothing. He was
almost sorry he had spoken. The first thing he had to do was to overcome a
reluctance to speak to people who obviously already had much that he was
after.
"I mean," he explained, "are you going to this college?"
"The Lord," the young man answered, "and Squibs Bailly alone know. I'm
told I'm not very bright in the head."
George smiled.
"Then I guess you can help me out. I'm not either. I want to enter in the fall,
and I need a professor or something like that to teach me. I'll pay."

The other nodded.
"You need a coach. Bailly's a good one. I'm going there now to be told for
two hours I'm an utter ass. Maybe I am, but what's the use rubbing it in? I
don't know that he's got any open time, but you might come along and see."
George, his excitement increasing, walked beside his new acquaintance.
"What's your name?" the bored youth asked all at once.
"Morton. George Morton."
"I'm Godfrey Rogers. Lawrenceville. What prep are you?"
"What what?"
"I mean, what school you come from?"
George experienced a sharp discomfort, facing the first of his unforeseen
embarrassments. Evidently his simple will to crush the past wouldn't be
sufficient.
"I went to a public school off and on," he muttered.
Rogers' eyes widened. George had a feeling that the boy had receded. It
wasn't until later, when he had learned the customs of the place, that he
could give that alteration its logical value. It made no difference. He had a
guide. Straightway he would find a man who could help him get in; but he
noticed that Rogers abandoned personalities, chatting only of the difficulties
of entrance papers, and the apparent mad desire of certain professors to
keep good men from matriculating.
They came to a small frame house on Dickinson Street. Rogers left George
in the hall while he entered the study. The door did not quite close, and
phrases slipped out in Rogers' glib voice, and, more frequently, in a shrill,
querulous one.
"Don't know a thing about him. Just met him on the street looking for a
coach. No prep."
"Haven't the time. I've enough blockheads as it is. He'd better go to Corse's
school."

"You won't see him?"
"Oh, send him in," George heard Bailly say irritably. "You, Rogers, would
sacrifice me or the entire universe to spare your brain five minutes' useful
work. I'll find out what he knows, and pack him off to Corse. Wait in the
hall."
Rogers came out, shaking his head.
"Guess there's nothing doing, but he'll pump you."
George entered and closed the door. Behind a table desk lounged a long,
painfully thin figure. The head was nearly bald, but the face carried a
luxuriant, carelessly trimmed Van Dyke beard. Above it cheeks and
forehead were intricately wrinkled, and the tweed suit, apparently, strove to
put itself in harmony. It was difficult to guess how old Squibs Bailly was;
probably very ancient, yet in his eyes George caught a flashing spirit of
youth.
The room was forcefully out of key with its occupant. The desk, extremely
neat with papers, blotters, and pens, was arranged according to a careful
pattern. On books and shelves no speck of dust showed, and so far the place
was scholarly. Then George was a trifle surprised to notice, next to a sepia
print of the Parthenon, a photograph of a football team. That, moreover, was
the arrangement around the four walls—classic ruins flanked by modern
athletes. On a table in the window, occupying what one might call the
position of honour, stood a large framed likeness of a young man in football
togs.
Before George had really closed the door the high voice had opened its
attack.
"I haven't any more time for dunces."
"I'm not a dunce," George said, trying to hold his temper.
Bailly didn't go on right away. The youthful glance absorbed each detail of
George's face and build.
"Anyhow," he said after a moment, less querulously, "let's see what you
lack of the infantile requirements needful for entrance in an American

university."
He probed George's rapid acquaintance with mathematics, history, English,
and the classics. With modern languages there was none. Then the verdict
came. Two years' work.
"I've got to make my eyes and brain do," George said. "I've got to enter
college this fall or never. I tell you, Mr. Bailly, I am going to do it. I know
you can help me, if you will. I'll pay."
Bailly shook his head.
"Even if I had the time my charges are high."
George showed his whole hand.
"I have about five hundred dollars."
"For this condensed acquisition of a kindergarten knowledge, or—or——"
"For everything. But only let me get in and I'll work my way through."
Again Bailly shook his head.
"You can't get in this fall, and it's not so simple to work your way through."
"Then," George said, "you refuse to do anything for me?"
The youthful eyes squinted. George had an odd impression that they sought
beyond his body to learn just what manner of man he was. The querulous
voice possessed more life.
"How tall are you?"
"A little over six feet."
"What's your weight?"
George hesitated, unable to see how such questions could affect his entering
college. He decided it was better to answer.
"A hundred and eighty-five."

"Good build!" Bailly mused. "Wish I'd had a build like that. If your mind is
as well proportioned——Take your coat off. Roll up your sleeves."
"What for?" George asked.
Bailly arose and circled the desk. George saw that the skeleton man limped.
"Because I'd like to see if the atrophying of your brain has furnished any
compensations."
George grinned. The portrait in the window seemed friendly. He obeyed.
Bailly ran his hand over George's muscles. His young eyes widened.
"Ever play football?"
George shook his head doubtfully.
"Not what you would call really playing. Why? Would football help?"
"Provided one's the right stuff otherwise, would being a god help one climb
Olympus?" Bailly wanted to know.
He indicated the framed likeness in the window.
"That's Bill Gregory."
"Seems to me I've seen his name in the papers," George said.
Bailly stared.
"Without doubt, if you read the public prints at all. He exerted much useful
cunning and strength in the Harvard and Yale games last fall. He was on
everybody's All-American eleven. I got him into college and man-handled
him through. Hence this scanty hair, these premature furrows; for although
he had plenty of good common-sense, and was one of the finest boys I've
ever known, he didn't possess, speaking relatively, when it came to iron-
bound text-books, the brains of a dinosaur; but he had the brute force of
one."
"Why did you do it?" George asked. "Because he was rich?"

"Young man," Bailly answered, "I am a product of this seat of learning.
With all its faults—and you may learn their number for yourself some day
—its success is pleasing to me, particularly at football. I am very fond of
football, perhaps because it approximates in our puling, modern fashion, the
classic public games of ruddier days. In other words, I was actuated by a
formless emotion called Princeton spirit. Don't ask me what that is. I don't
know. One receives it according to one's concept. But when I saw in Bill
something finer and more determined than most men possess, I made up my
mind Princeton was going to be proud of him, on the campus, on the
football field, and afterward out in the world."
The hollow, wrinkled face flushed.
"When Bill made a run I could think of it as my run. When he made a
touchdown I could say, 'there's one score that wouldn't have been made if I
hadn't booted Bill into college, and kept him from flunking out by sheer
brute mentality!' Pardon me, Mr. Morton. I love the silly game."
George smiled, sensing his way, if only he could make this fellow feel he
would be the right kind of Princeton man!
"I was going to say," he offered, "that while I had never had a chance to
play on a regular team I used to mix it up at school, but I was stronger than
most of the boys. There were one or two accidents. They thought I'd better
quit."
Bailly laughed.
"That's the kind of material we want. You do look as if you could bruise a
blue or a crimson jersey. Know where the field house is? Ask anybody. Do
no harm for the trainer to look you over. Be there at three o'clock."
"But my work? Will you help me?"
"Give me," Bailly pled, "until afternoon to decide if I'll take another ten
years from my life. That's all. Send that fellow Rogers in. Be at the field
house at three o'clock."
And as George passed out he heard him reviling the candidate.

"Don't see why you come to college. No chance to make the team or a Phi
Beta Kappa. One ought to be a requisite."
The shrill voice went lower. George barely caught the words certainly not
intended for him.
"You know I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that fellow you brought me, if he
had a chance, might do both."

II

George, since he had nothing else to do, walked home. Bailly could get him
in if he would. Did it really depend in part on the inspection he would have
to undergo that afternoon? It was hard there was nothing he could do to
prepare himself. He went to the yard, to which the landlady had condemned
Sylvia's bulldog, and, to kill time, played with the friendly animal until
luncheon. Afterward he sat in his room before Sylvia's portrait impressing
on himself the necessity of strength for the coming ordeal.
His landlady directed him glibly enough to the field house. As he crossed
the practice gridiron, not yet chalked out, he saw Bailly on the verandah;
and, appearing very small and sturdy beside him, a gray-haired, pleasant-
faced man whose small eyes were relentless.
"This is the prospect, Green," George heard Bailly say.
The trainer studied George for some time before he nodded his head.
"A build to hurt and not get hurt," he said at last; "but, Mr. Bailly, it's hard
to supply experience. Boys come here who have played all their lives, and
they know less than nothing. Bone seems to grow naturally in the football
cranium."
He shifted back to George.
"How fast are you?"
"I've never timed myself, but I'm hard to catch."
"Get out there," the trainer directed.

"In those clothes?" Bailly asked.
"Why not? The ground's dry. A man wouldn't run any faster with moleskins
and cleats. Now you run as far as the end of that stand. Halt there for a
minute, then turn and come back."
He drew out a stop watch.
"All set? Then—git!"
George streaked down the field.
"It's an even hundred yards," the trainer explained to Bailly.
As George paused at the end of the stand the trainer snapped his watch,
whistling.
"There are lots with running shoes and drawers wouldn't do any better. Let's
have him back."
He waved his arm. George tore up and leant against the railing, breathing
hard, but not uncomfortably.
"You were a full second slower coming back," the trainer said with a
twinkle.
"I'm sorry," George cried. "Let me try it again."
Green shook his head.
"I'd rather see you make a tackle, but I've no one to spare."
He grinned invitation at Bailly.
"My spirit, Green," the tutor said, "is less fragile than my corpus, but it has
some common-sense. I prefer others should perish at the hands of my
discoveries."
"You've scrubbed around," the trainer said, appraising George's long,
muscular legs. "Ever kick a football?"
"A little."

Green entered the field house, reappearing after a moment with a football
tucked under his arm.
"Do you mind stepping down the field, Mr. Bailly, to catch what he punts? I
wouldn't go too far."
Bailly nodded and walked a short distance away. The trainer gave George
the football and told him to kick it to Bailly. George stepped on the grass
and swung his leg. If the ball had travelled horizontally as far as it did
toward heaven it would have been a good kick. For half an hour the trainer
coached interestedly, teaching George the fundamentals of kicking form.
Some of the later punts, indeed, boomed down the field for considerable
distances, but in George's mind the high light of that unexpected experience
remained the lanky, awkward figure in wrinkled tweeds, limping about the
field, sometimes catching the ball, sometimes looking hurt when it bounded
from his grasp, sometimes missing it altogether, and never once losing the
flashing pleasure from his eyes or the excitement out of his furrowed face.
"Enough," the trainer said at last.
George heard him confide to the puffing tutor:
"Possibilities. Heaven knows we'll need them a year from this fall,
especially in the kicking line. I believe this fellow can be taught."
Bailly, his hands shaking from his recent exercise, lighted a pipe. He
assumed a martyr's air. His voice sounded as though someone had done him
an irreparable wrong.
"Then I'll have to try, but it's hard on me, Green, you'll admit."
George hid his excitement. He knew he had passed his first examination. He
was sure he would enter college. Already he felt the confidence most men
placed in Squibs Bailly.
"Wouldn't you have taken him on anyway, Mr. Bailly?" the trainer laughed.
"Anyway, a lot of my players are first-group men. I depend on you to turn
him over in the fall for the Freshman eleven. Going to town?"
"Come on, Morton," Bailly said, remorsefully.

Side by side the three walked through to Nassau Street and past the campus.
George said nothing, drinking in the scarcely comprehensible talk of the
others about team prospects and the appalling number of powerful and
nimble young men who would graduate the following June.
Near University Place he noticed Rogers loafing in front of a restaurant
with several other youths who wore black caps. He wondered why Rogers
started and stared at him, then turned, speaking quickly to the others.
Green went down University Place. George paced on with Bailly. In front of
the Nassau Club the tutor paused.
"I'm going in here," he said, "but you can come to my house at eight-thirty.
We'll work until ten-thirty. We'll do that every night until your brain
wrinkles a trifle. You may not have been taught that twenty-four hours are
allotted to each day. Eight for sleep. Two with me. Two for meals. Two at
the field. Two for a run in the country. That leaves eight for study, and you'll
need every minute of them. I'll give you your schedule to-night. If you
break it once I'll drop you, for you've got to have a brain beyond the
ordinary to make it wrinkle enough."
"Thanks, Mr. Bailly. If you don't mind, what will it cost?"
Bailly considered.
"I'll have to charge you," he said at last, "twenty-five dollars, but I can lend
you most of the books."
George understood, but his pride was not hurt.
"I'll pay you in other ways."
Bailly looked at him, his emaciated face smiling all over.
"I think you will," he said with a little nod. "All right. At eight-thirty."
He limped along the narrow cement walk and entered the club. George
started back. The group, he noticed, still loitered in front of the restaurant.
Rogers detached himself and strolled across. He was no longer suspicious.
"You been down at the field with Mr. Green?"

"Yes."
"What for?"
"Running a little, kicking a football around."
"Trust Bailly to guess you played. What did Green say?"
"If I get in," George, answered simply, "I think he'll give me a show."
"I guess so," Rogers said, thoughtfully, "or he wouldn't be wasting his time
on you now. Come on over and meet these would-be Freshmen. We'll all be
in the same class unless we get brain-fever. Mostly Lawrenceville."
George crossed and submitted to elaborate introductions and warm
greetings.
"Green's grooming him already for the Freshman eleven," Rogers
explained.
George accepted the open admiration cautiously, not forgetting what he had
been yesterday, what Sylvia had said. Why was Rogers so friendly all at
once?
"What prep?" "Where'd you play?" "Line or backfield?"
The rapidity of the questions lessened his discomfort. How was he to avoid
such moments? He must make his future exceptionally full so that it might
submerge the past of which he couldn't speak without embarrassment. In
this instance Rogers helped him out.
"Morton's bummed around. Never went to any school for long."
George pondered this kind act and its fashion as he excused himself and
walked on to his lodging. There was actually something to hide, and Rogers
admitted it, and was willing to lend a cloak. He could guess why. Because
Green was bothering with him, had condescended to be seen on the street
with him. George's vision broadened.
He locked himself in his room and sat before his souvenirs. Sylvia's
provocative features seemed clearer. For a long time he stared hungrily. He

had an absurd impression that he had already advanced toward her. Perhaps
he had in view of what had happened that afternoon.
His determination as well as his strength had clearly attracted Bailly; yet
that strength, its possible application to football, had practically assured him
he would enter college, had made an ally of the careful Rogers, had aroused
the admiration of such sub-Freshmen as were in town. It became clear that
if he should be successful at football he would achieve a position of
prominence from which he could choose friends useful here and even in the
vital future after college.
His planning grew more practical. If football, a game of which he knew
almost nothing, could do that, what might he not draw from one he
thoroughly knew—anything concerning horses, for instance, hunting, polo?
The men interested in horses would be the rich, the best—he choked a trifle
over the qualification—the financial and social leaders of the class. He
would have that card up his sleeve. He would play it when it would impress
most. Skill at games, he hazarded, would make it easier than he had thought
to work his way through.
Whatever distaste such cold calculation brought he destroyed by staring at
Sylvia's remote beauty. If he was to reach such a goal he would have to use
every possible short cut, no matter how unlovely.
He found that evening a radical alteration in Squibs Bailly's study. The
blotter was spattered with ink. Papers littered the desk and drifted about the
floor. Everything within reach of the tutor's hands was disarranged and
disreputably untidy. Bailly appeared incomparably more comfortable.
The course opened with a small lecture, delivered while the attenuated man
limped up and down the cluttered room.
"Don't fancy," he began, "that you have found in football a key to the
scholastic labyrinth."
His wrinkled face assumed a violent disapproval. His youthful eyes flashed
resentfully.
"Mr. Morton, if I suffered the divine Delphic frenzy and went to the Dean
and assured him you were destined to be one of our very best

undergraduates and at the same time would make fifteen touchdowns
against Yale, and roughly an equal number against Harvard, do you know
what he would reply?"
George gathered that an answer wasn't necessary.
"You might think," the tutor resumed, limping faster than ever, "that he
would run his fingers through his hair, if he had sufficient; would
figuratively flame with pleasure; would say: 'Miraculous, Mr. Bailly. You
are a great benefactor. We must get this extraordinary youth in the
university even if he can't parse "the cat caught the rat."'"
Bailly paused. He clashed his hands together.
"Now I'll tell you what he'd actually reply. 'Interesting if true, Mr. Bailly.
But what are his scholastic attainments? Can he solve a quadratic equation
in his head? Has he committed to memory my favourite passages of the
"Iliad" of Homer and the "Aeneid" of Virgil? Can he name the architect of
the Parthenon or the sculptor of the Aegean pediments? No? Horrible! Then
off with his head!'"
Bailly draped himself across his chair.
"Therefore it behooves us to get to work."

III

That was the first of sixty-odd toilsome, torturing evenings, for Bailly failed
to honour the Sabbath; and, after that first lecture, drab business alone
coloured those hours. The multiplicity of subjects was confusing; but,
although Bailly seldom told him so, George progressed rapidly, and Bailly
knew just where to stress for the examinations.
If it had ended there it would have been bad enough. When he studied the
schedule Bailly gave him that first night he had a despairing feeling that
either he or it must break down. Everything was accounted for even to the
food he was to eat. That last, in fact, created a little difficulty with the
landlady, who seemed to have no manner of appreciation of the world-
moving importance of football. Rogers wanted to help out there, too. He

had found George's lodging. It was when Green's interest was popular
knowledge, when from the Nassau Club had slipped the belief that Squibs
Bailly had turned his eyes on another star. George made it dispassionately
clear to Rogers that Bailly had not allowed in his schedule for calls. Rogers
was visibly disappointed.
"Where do you eat, then?"
"Here—with Mrs. Michin."
"Now look, Morton. That's no way. Half a dozen of us are eating at Joe's
restaurant. They're the best of the sub-Freshmen that are here. Come along
with us."
The manner of the invitation didn't make George at all reluctant to tell the
truth.
"I can't afford to be eating around in restaurants."
"That needn't figure," Rogers said, quickly. "Green's probably only letting
you eat certain things. I'll guarantee Joe'll take you on for just what you're
paying Mrs. Michin."
George thought rapidly. He could see through Rogers now. The boy wanted,
even as he did, to run with the best, but for a vastly different cause. That
was why his manner had altered that first morning when he had sized
George up as the unfinished product of a public school, why it had altered
again when he had sensed in him a football star. George's heart warmed, but
not to Rogers. Because he rioted around for a period each afternoon in an
odorous football suit he was already, in the careful Rogers' eyes, one of the
most prominent of the students in town. For the same reason he was in a
position to wait and make sure that Rogers himself was the useful sort.
George possessed no standard by which to judge, and it would be a mistake
to knot ropes that he might want to break later; nor did he care for that sort
of charity, no matter how well disguised, so he shook his head.
"Green and Squibs wouldn't put up with it."
He wheedled his landlady, instead, into a better humour, paying her
reluctantly a little more.

The problem of expenses was still troublesome, but it became evident that
there, too, Bailly would be a useful guide.
"I have actually bearded the dean about you," he said one evening. "There
are a few scholarships not yet disposed of. If I can prove to him that you
live by syntax alone you may get one. As for the rest, there's the commons.
Impecunious students profitably wait on table there."
George's flush was not pretty.
"I'll not be a servant," he snapped.
"It's no disgrace," Bailly said, mildly.
"It is—for me."
He didn't like Bailly's long, slightly pained scrutiny. There was no use
keeping things from him anyway.
"I can trust you, Mr. Bailly," he said, quickly, and in a very low voice, as if
the walls might hear: "I know you won't give me away. I—I was too much
like a servant until the day I came to Princeton. I've sworn I'd never be
again. I can't touch that job. I tell you I'd rather starve."
"To do so," Bailly remarked, drily, "would be a senseless suicide. You'll
appreciate some day, young man, that the world lives by service."
George wondered why he glanced at the untidy table with a smile twitching
at the corners of his mouth.
"I'm also sorry to learn your ambition is not altogether unselfish, or
altogether worthy."
George longed to make Bailly understand.
"It was forced on me," he said. "I worked in my father's livery business
until he failed. Then I had to go to a rich man's stable. I was treated like
dirt. Nobody would have anything to do with me. They won't here,
probably, if they find out."
"Never mind," Bailly sighed. "We will seek other means. Let us get on with
our primers."

Once or twice, when some knotty problem took George to the house during
the early morning, he found the spic-and-span neatness he had observed at
his first visit. In Bailly's service clearly someone laboured with a love of
labour, without shame or discouragement.
One evening in August the maid who customarily opened the door was
replaced by a short, plump-looking woman well over thirty. She greeted
George with kindly eyes.
"I daresay you're Mr. Morton. I've heard a great deal about you."
George had never seen a face more unaffected, more friendly, more
competent. His voice was respectful.
"Yes, ma'am."
"And I am Mrs. Bailly. We expect much of you."
There rushed over George a feeling that, his own ambition aside, he had to
give them a great deal. No wonder Squibs felt as he did if his ideas of
service had emerged from such a source.
That portion of his crowded schedule George grew eventually to like. It
brought him either unrestrained scolding or else a tempered praise; and he
enjoyed his cross-country runs. Sylvia's bulldog usually accompanied him,
unleashed, for he could control the animal. With surprised eyes he saw
estates as extravagant as Oakmont, and frequently in better taste. Little by
little he picked up the names of the families that owned them. He told
himself that some day he would enter those places as a guest, bowed to by
such servants as he had been. It was possible, he promised himself bravely,
if only he could win a Yale or a Harvard game.
He enjoyed, too, the hours he spent at the field. He could measure his
progress there as well as in Bailly's study. Green was slow with either praise
or blame, but sometimes Rogers and his clan would come down, and, sitting
in the otherwise empty stands, would audibly marvel at the graceful
trajectory of his punts. He soiled himself daily at the tackling dummy. He
sprawled after an elusive ball, falling on it or picking it up on the run.
Meantime, he had absorbed the elements of the rules. He found them rather
more complicated than the classics.

The head coach came from the city one day. Like Green, he said nothing in
praise or blame, merely criticising pleasantly; but George felt that he was
impressed. The great man even tossed the ball about with him for a while,
teaching him to throw at a definite mark. After that Rogers and his cronies
wanted to be more in evidence than ever, but George had no time for them,
or for anything outside his work.
His will to survive the crushing grind never really faltered, but he resented
its necessity, sometimes wistfully, sometimes with turbulence. He despised
himself for regretting certain pleasanter phases of his serfdom at Oakmont.
The hot, stuffy room on the top floor of the frame house; the difficult
books; the papers streaked with intricate and reluctant figures, contrived
frequently to swing his mind to pastoral corners of the Planter estate. He
might have held title to them, they had been so much his own. He had used
them during his free time for the reading of novels, and latterly, he
remembered, for formless dreams of Sylvia's beauty. At least his mind had
not been put to the torture there. He had had time to listen to a bird's song,
to ingratiate himself with a venturesome squirrel, to run his hands through
the long grass, to lie half asleep, brain quite empty save for a temporal
content.
Now, running or walking in the country, he found no time for the happier
aspects of woods or fields. He had to drive himself physically in order that
his mind could respond to Bailly's urgencies. And sometimes, as has been
suggested, his revolt was more violent. He paced his room angrily. Why did
he do it? Why did he submit? Eventually his eyes would turn to her
photograph, and he would go back to his table.
He was grateful for the chance that had let him pick up that picture. Without
its constant supervision he might not have been able to keep up the struggle.
During the worst moments, when some solution mocked him, he would
stare at the likeness while his brain fought, while, with a sort of self-
hypnosis induced by that pictured face, he willed himself to keep on.
One night, when he had suffered over an elusive equation beyond his
scheduled bedtime, he found his eyes, as he stared at the picture, blurring
strangely; then the thing was done, the answer proved; but after what an
effort! Why did his eyes blur? Because of the intensity of some emotion

whose significance he failed all at once to grasp. He continued to stare at
Sylvia's beauty, informed even here with a sincere intolerance; at those lips
which had released the contempt that had delivered him to this other
slavery. Abruptly the emotion, that had seemed to leap upon him from the
books and the complicated figures, defined itself with stark, unavoidable
brutality. He reached out and with both hands grasped the photograph. He
wanted to snatch his hands apart, ripping the paper, destroying the tranquil,
arrogant features. He replaced the picture, leant back, and continued
hypnotically to study it. His hands grasped the table's edge while the
blurring of his eyes increased. He spoke aloud in a clear and sullen voice:
"I hate you," he said. "With all my heart and soul and body I hate you."

IV

About this time one partial break in the schedule came like a strong tonic.
Bailly at the close of an evening's session spoke, George fancied, with a
little embarrassment.
"My wife wants to speak to you before you go."
He raised his voice.
"Martha! The battle's over for to-night."
She came quietly in and perched herself on the arm of a chair.
"I'm having a few people for dinner to-morrow," she explained. "There's
one young girl, so I want a young man. Won't you help me out?"
George's elation was shot with doubt of an unexplored territory. This
promised an advance if he could find the way. He glanced inquiringly at
Bailly.
"Women," the tutor said, "lack a sense of values. I shall be chained anyway
to my wife's ill-conceived hospitality, so you might as well come. But we'll
dine early so we won't destroy an entire evening."
"Then at seven-thirty, Mr. Morton," Mrs. Bailly said.

"Thank you," George answered. "I shall be very happy to come."
As a matter of fact, he was there before seven-thirty, over-anxious to be
socially adequate. He had worried a good deal about the invitation. Could it
be traced to his confession to Bailly? Was it, in any sense, a test? At least it
bristled with perplexities. His ordinary suit of clothing, even after an
extended pressing and brushing, was, he felt, out of place. It warned him
that of the ritual of a mixed dinner he was blankly ignorant. He established
two cardinal principles. He would watch and imitate the others. He wouldn't
open his mouth unless he had to.
Bailly, with tact, wore the disgraceful tweeds, but there were two other
men, a professor and a resident, George gathered in the rapidity of the
introduction which slurred names. These wore evening clothes. Of the two
elderly women who accompanied them one was quite dazzling, displaying
much jewellery, and projecting an air truly imperial. Side by side with her
Mrs. Bailly appeared more than ever a priestess of service; yet to George
her serene self-satisfaction seemed ornament enough.
Where, George wondered, was the girl for whom he had been asked?
Mrs. Bailly drew him from these multiple introductions. He turned and saw
the girl standing in the doorway, a dazzling portrait in a dingy frame. As he
faced her George was aware of a tightening of all his defences. Her
clothing, her attitude, proclaimed her as of Sylvia's sort. He ventured to
raise his eyes to her face. It was there, too, the habit of the beautiful, the
obvious unfamiliarity with life's grayer tones. Yet she did not resemble
Sylvia. Her skin was nearly white. Her hair glinted with gold; but she, too,
was lovely. George asked himself if she would have lifted the crop, if all
these fortunates reacted to a precise and depressing formula. Somehow he
couldn't imagine this girl striking to hurt.
Mrs. Bailly presented him. Her name was Alston, Betty
Alston, it developed during the succeeding general conversation. He fixed
the stouter of the men in evening clothes as her father and the imperial
woman as her mother. He understood then that they were, indeed, of
Sylvia's sort, for during his cross-country work he had frequently passed
their home, an immense Tudor house in the midst of pleasant acres.

It was because of the girl that the pitfalls of dinner were bridged. In the
technique of accepting Mrs. Bailly's excellent courses he was always a trifle
behind her. She made conversation, moreover, surprisingly easy. After the
first few moments, during which no one troubled to probe his past, the older
people left them to themselves. She didn't ask what his prep was, or where
he lived, or any other thing to make him stammer.
"You look like a football player," she said, frankly.
They talked of his work. He said he had admired her home during his runs.
She responded naturally:
"When we are really back you must come and see it more intimately."
The invitation to enter the gates!
He fell silent. Would it be fair to go without giving her an opportunity to
treat him as Sylvia had done? Why should she inspire such a question?
Hadn't he willed his past to oblivion? Hadn't he determined to take every
short cut? Of course he would go, as George Morton, undergraduate,
football player, magician with horses. The rest was none of her business.
They were in Princeton, she explained, only for a few days from time to
time, but would be definitely back when college opened. She, too, was
going to be introduced to society that winter. He wanted to ask her how it
was done. He pictured a vast apartment, dense with unpleasant people, and
a man who cried out with a brazen voice: "Ladies and gentlemen! This is
Miss Sylvia Planter. This is Miss Betty Alston." Quite like an auction.
"It must be wonderful to play football," she was saying. "I should have
preferred to be a man. What can a girl do? Bad tennis, rotten golf,
something with horses."
He smiled. He could impress Betty Alston, but there was no point in that,
because she was a girl, and he could think of only one girl.
Yet he carried home an impression of unexpected interest and kindness. Her
proximity, the rustling of her gown, the barely detectable perfume from her
tawny hair, furnished souvenirs intangible but very warm in his memory.
They made the portrait and the broken crop seem lifeless and unimpressive.

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

V

He saw Betty Alston once more before college opened, unexpectedly,
briefly, and disturbingly; but with all that he carried again to his lodging an
impression of a distracting contact.
He was out for a morning run, wearing some ancient flannels Bailly had
loaned him, and a sweater, for autumn's first exhilaration sharpened the air.
Sylvia's bulldog barked joyously about him as he trotted through a lane not
far from the Alston place. He often went that way, perhaps because its gates
were already half open. As he turned the corner of a hedge he came face to
face with Betty. In a short skirt and knitted jacket she was even more
striking than she had been at the Bailly's. The unexpected encounter had
brought colour to her rather pale face. The bulldog sprang for her. George
halted him with a sharp command.
"I am not afraid of him," she laughed. "Come here, savage beast."
The dog crawled to her and licked her fingers. George saw her examining
the animal curiously.
"I hope he didn't frighten you," he said, his cap in his hand.
She glanced up, and at her voice George straightened, and turned quickly
away so that she couldn't see the response to her amazing question. Was it,
he asked himself, traceable to Old Planter's threats. Were they going to try
to smash him at the start and keep him out of Princeton?
"Do you happen," Betty had said, frowning, "to know Sylvia Planter, or,
perhaps, her brother, Lambert?"
George didn't care to lie; nor was it, his instinct told him, safe to lie to
Betty. She knew the Planters, then. But how could Old Planter drive him
out except through his parents? He wasn't going to be driven out. He turned
back slowly. In Betty's face he read only a slight bewilderment.
"That's a queer thing to ask," he managed.

"The dog," she said, caressing the ugly snout, "is the image of one Sylvia
Planter was very fond of. Sylvia and I were at school together last year. I've
just been visiting her the last few days. She said she had given her dog
away."
She drew the dog closer and read the name on the collar.
"Roland! What was the name of her dog?"
George relaxed.
"That dog," he said, harshly, "belongs to me."
She glanced at him, surprised, releasing the dog and standing up. It wasn't
Old Planter then, and his parents were probably safe enough; but had
Sylvia, he asked himself angrily, made a story for her guest out of his
unwary declaration and his abrupt vanishing from Oakmont? Did this
friendly creature know anything? If she did she would cease to be amiable.
His anger diminished as he saw the curiosity leave her face.
"An odd resemblance! Do you know, Mr. Morton, I rather think you're
bound to meet Lambert Planter anyway. I believe he's a very important
young man at Yale. You'll have to play football a little better than he does.
His sister and he are going to visit me for a few days before he goes back to
New Haven. Perhaps you'll see him then."
George resented the prospect. He got himself away.
"Squibs," he told her, "sees everything. If I loiter he finds out and scolds."
He had an impression that she looked after him until he was out of sight. Or
was it the dog that still puzzled her? Something of her, at least,
accompanied him longer than that—her kindness, her tact in the matter of
the Planters. He would take very good care that he didn't meet Lambert; the
prospect of Sylvia's adjacence, however, filled him with a disturbing
excitement. He wanted to see her, but he felt it wouldn't be safe to have her
see him yet.
Her picture increased his excitement, filled him with a craving for her
physical presence. He desired to look at her, as he had looked at the
photograph, to see if he could tell himself under those conditions that he

hated her. Whether that was true or not, he was more determined than ever
to make his boasts good.

VI

The day of the immediate test approached and he found himself no longer
afraid of it. Even Bailly one early September evening abandoned cynicism.
"You've every chance, Morton," he said, puffing at his pipe, "to enter
creditably. You may have a condition in French, but what of that? We'll
have it off by the divisionals. I'll admit you're far from a dunce. During the
next ten days we'll concentrate on the examination idiosyncrasies of my
revered colleagues."
The scholarship had, in fact, been won for George, but the necessary work,
removed from any suspicion of the servatorial, had not yet been found.
Bailly, although he plainly worried himself, told George not to be impatient;
then, just before the entrance examinations, the head coach arrived and
settled himself in Princeton. Self-assured young men drifted to the field
now every afternoon—"varsity men," the Rogers clan whispered with awe.
And there were last year's substitutes, and faithful slaves of the scrub, over-
anxious, pouring out to early practice, grasping at one more chance. So far
no Freshmen candidates had been called, but the head coach was heard to
whisper to Green:
"We'd better work this fellow Morton with the squad until the cubs start.
He'll stand a lot of practice. Give him all the football he'll hold. He's
outkicking his ends now. Jack him up without cutting down his distance. I'd
like to see him make a tackle. He looks good at the dummy, but you never
can tell. He may be an ear-puller."
The magic words slipped through the town. George caught arriving
Freshmen pointing him out. He overheard glowing prophecies.
"Green says he'll outkick Dewitt."
It didn't turn his head. To be the greatest player the game had ever known
wouldn't have turned his head, for that would have been only one small step

toward the summit from which Sylvia looked down on him with
contemptuous, inimical eyes.
The head coach one afternoon gave the ball to a young man of no
pronounced value, and instructed him to elude George if he could.
"You, Morton," the head coach instructed, "see that he doesn't get past you.
Remember what you've done to the dummy."
George nodded, realizing that this was a real test to be passed with a
hundred per cent. That man with the ball had the power and the desire to
make a miserable failure of him. For the moment he seemed more than a
man, deadly, to be conquered at any cost. Schooled by his rough-and-
tumble combats at school and in the stables, George kept his glance on the
other's eyes; knew, therefore, when he was going to side-step, and in which
direction; lunged at exactly the right moment; clipped the runner about the
knees; lifted him; brought him crashing to the ground. The ball rolled to one
side. George released his man, sprawled, and gathered the ball in his arms.
A great silence descended on the field. Out of it, as George got up, slipped
the uncertain voice of his victim.
"Did anything break off, Green? That wasn't a tackle. It was a bad accident.
How could I tell he was a bull when he didn't wear horns?"
George helped the man to his feet.
"Hope I didn't hurt you."
"Oh, no. I'll be all right again in a couple of months."
He limped about his work, muttering:
"Maybe mother was right when she didn't want me to play this game."
The coach wasn't through. He gave the ball to George and signalled one of
the biggest of the varsity men.
"Let me see you get past that fellow, Morton."
George didn't get past, although, with the tackler's vise-like grip about his
legs, he struggled with knees and elbows, and kept his feet until the coach

called to let him go.
"I'm sorry," George began.
"Yes," Green said, severely, "you've got to learn to get past tacklers. If you
learn to do that consistently I'll guarantee you a place on the team, provided
Mr. Stringham's willing."
"I'm willing," the head coach said with apparent reluctance.
Everyone within hearing laughed, but George couldn't laugh, although he
knew it was expected.
"Mr. Stringham," he said, "I will learn to get past them unless they come too
thick."
The coach patted his shoulder. His voice was satisfied.
"Run along to the showers now."
There may have been something in the sequence of these events, for that
very night Squibs Bailly's face twitched with satisfaction.
"You have a share," he said, "in the agency of the laundry most generally
patronized by our young men. It will pay you enough unless you long for
automobiles and gaiety."
"No," George said, "but, Mr. Bailly, I need clothes. I can afford to buy some
now. Where shall I go? What shall I get?"
Bailly limped about thoughtfully. He named a tailor of the town. He
prescribed an outing suit and a dinner suit.
"Because," he said, "if you're asked about, you want to be able to go, and a
dinner suit will pass for a Freshman nearly anywhere."
"If," George asked himself defiantly as he walked home, "Squibs thinks my
ambition unworthy, why does he go out of his way to boost it? Anyway, I'm
going to do my best to make touchdowns for him and Mrs. Squibs. Is that
Princeton spirit, or Bailly spirit, or am I fooling myself, and am I going to
make touchdowns just for myself and Sylvia Planter?"

VII

The meeting he had desired above all things to avoid took place when he
was, for a moment, off his guard. He was on his way to Dickinson Hall for
his first examination. Perhaps that was why he was too absorbed to notice
the automobile drawn up at the curb just ahead, and facing him. He had no
warning. He nearly collided with Lambert Planter, who walked out of a
shop. George stopped, drew back, and thought of dodging behind the
procession of worried, sombrely clothed Freshmen; but there wasn't time.
Lambert's face showed bewilderment and recognition.
"Certainly it is Mr. Morton," he said in his old mocking fashion.
George glanced at the surprised features which, in a masculine fashion,
were reminiscent of Sylvia; and beyond he saw, in the rear seat of the
automobile, Sylvia herself, lovelier, more removed than ever. Betty Alston
sat at her side. Evidently neither had observed the encounter, for they
laughed and chatted, probably about the terror-stricken Freshmen.
George swallowed hard.
"I heard you were going to be here. I wanted to keep out of your way."
"But why?" Lambert laughed. "You have a scholastic appearance. You
never mean——"
"I am taking my entrance examinations," George said. "I want to make good
here."
He looked straight into Lambert's eyes. His voice became incisive,
threatening.
"I will make good. Don't try giving me away. Don't you tell Miss Alston
where I came from——"
"Yeh. The big fellow! Morton! Stringham and Green say he's going to be a
wonder."
It drifted to them from the passing youths.
Lambert whistled. The mockery left his voice.

"Go as far as you can," he said.
And followed it with:
"Don't be a self-conscious ass."
He smiled whimsically.
"Glad to have run into you—George."
The driver had noticed Lambert. The automobile glided nearer.
"I—I've got to get away," George said, hastily. "I don't want your sister to
see me."
Lambert turned. His voice, in turn, was a trifle threatening.
"That's all nonsense. She's forgotten all about you; she wouldn't know you
from Adam."
George couldn't help staring. What a contrast the two young women
offered! He wanted to realize that he actually looked at Sylvia Planter,
Sylvia of the flesh, Sylvia who had expressed for him an endless contempt.
But he couldn't help seeing also the golden hair and the soft colouring of
Betty Alston.
Lambert sprang into the car. Sylvia and Betty both glanced at the man he
had left. George waited. What would happen now? Sylvia's colour did not
heighten. Her eyes did not falter. Betty smiled and waved her hand. George
took off his cap, still expectant. Sylvia's lifeless stare continued until the car
had rolled away. George sighed, relaxed, and went on.
Had Lambert been right? He didn't want to believe that. It hurt too much.
"She saw me," he muttered. "She stared, not as if she saw an unknown man,
but as if she wanted to make me think she saw nothing. She saw me."
But he couldn't be sure. It seemed to him then that he wanted more than
anything in the world to be sure.
And he had not taken advantage of his chance. Instead of looking at her and
fixing the stark fact of hatred in his mind, he had only thought with an

angry, craving desire:
"You are the loveliest thing in the world. The next time you'll know me. By
God, the next time I'll make you know me."

VIII

In the examination hall George called upon his will to drive from his mind
the details of that encounter. Lambert might be dependable, but if Sylvia
had actually recognized him what might she not say to Betty Alston? He
didn't want to see the kindness vanish from Betty's eyes, nor the friendliness
from her manner. Lambert's assurance, moreover, that Sylvia had forgotten
him lingered irritatingly.
"I will not think of it," George told himself. "I will think of nothing but this
paper. I will pass it."
This ability to discipline his mind had increased steadily during his hours
before Sylvia's portrait. The simple command "I will," was a necessity his
brain met with a decreasing reluctance. For two hours now it excluded
everything except his work. At the end of that time he signed his paper, sat
back, and examined the anxious young men crowded about him in the long
room. From these he must sooner or later detach the ones of value to
himself. That first quick appraisal disclosed little; they were clothed too
much to a pattern, wearing black jerseys, more often than not, black clothes,
with black caps hanging from the supports of their chairs. In their faces,
however, were visible differences that made him uneasy. Even from a
uniform, then, men, to an extent, projected discrepancies of birth, or
training, or habit. He sighed and turned in his paper.
At the foot of the stairs groups collected, discussing the ordeal
pessimistically. As he started to walk through, several spoke to George.
"How did you hit it, Morton?"
Already he was well spotted. He paused and joined the apprehensive
chatter.

"It's a toss-up with me," Rogers admitted. "Don't tell me any answers. If
ignorance is bliss, I want to stay dumb."
He caught George's arm.
"Have you met Dicky Goodhue? Hello, Goodhue!"
Goodhue gave the impression of not having met Rogers to any extent. He
was a sturdy young man with handsome, finely formed features. George
looked at him closely, because this young man alone of the Freshmen he
had met remained unmoved by his fame.
"Would like you to meet Morton, Goodhue."
Goodhue glanced at George inquiringly, almost resentfully.
"George Morton," Rogers stumbled on, as if an apology were necessary.
"Stringham, you know, and Green——"
"Glad to meet you," Goodhue said, indifferently.
"Thanks," George acknowledged as indifferently, and turned away.
Goodhue, it came upon him with a new appreciation of difficulties, was the
proper sort. He watched him walk off with a well-dressed, weak-looking
youth, threading a careless course among his classmates.
"How long have you known this fellow Goodhue?" George asked as he
crossed the campus with Rogers.
"Oh, Goodhue?" Rogers said, uncomfortably. "I've seen him any number of
times. Ran into him last night."
"Good-looking man," George commented. "Where's he come from?"
"You don't know who Dicky Goodhue is!" Rogers cried. "I mean, you must
have heard of his father anyway, the old Richard. Real Estate for
generations. Money grows for them without their turning a hand. Dicky's up
at the best clubs in New York. Plays junior polo on Long Island."
George had heard enough.

"If I do as well with the other exams," he said, "I'm going to get in."
With Freshmen customs what they were, he was thinking, he could appear
as well dressed as the Goodhue crowd. He would take pains with that.
He passed Goodhue on his way to the examination hall that afternoon, and
Goodhue didn't remember him. The incident made George thoughtful. Was
football going to prove the all-powerful lever he had fancied? At any rate,
Rogers' value was at last established.
He reported that evening to Bailly:
"I think it's all right so far."
The tutor grinned.
"To-day's beyond recall, but to-morrow's the future, and it cradles, among
other dragons, French."
He pointed out passages in a number of books.
"Wrestle with those until midnight," he counselled, "and then go to sleep.
Day after to-morrow we'll hope you can apply your boot to a football
again."
Mrs. Bailly stopped him in the hall.
"How did it go?" she asked, eagerly.
Her anxiety had about it something maternal. It gave him for the first time a
feeling of being at home in Princeton.
"I got through to-day," he said.
"Good! Good!"
She nodded toward the study.
"Then you have made him very happy."
"I always want to," George said. "That's a worthy ambition, isn't it?"
She looked at him gropingly, as if she almost caught his allusion.

IX

As George let himself out of the gate a closed automobile turned the corner
and drew up at the curb. The driver sprang down and opened the door. Betty
Alston's white-clad figure emerged and crossed the sidewalk while George
pulled off his cap and held the gate open for her. He suffered an ugly
suspense. What would she say? Would she speak to him at all? Phrases that
Sylvia might have used to her flashed through his mind; then he saw her
smile as usual. She held out her hand. The warmth of her fingers seemed to
reach his mind, making it less unyielding. The fancy put him on his guard.
"I know you passed," she said.
He walked with her across the narrow yard to the porch.
"I think so, to-day."
She paused with her foot on the lower step. The light from the corner
disclosed her face, puzzled and undecided; and his uneasiness returned.
"I am just returning this," she said, holding up a book. "I'd be glad to drop
you at your lodging——"
"I'll wait."
While she was inside he paced the sidewalk. There had been a question in
her face, but not the vital one, which, indeed, she wouldn't have troubled to
ask. Sylvia had not recognized him, or, recognizing him, had failed to give
him away.
Betty came gracefully down the steps, and George followed her into the
pleasant obscurity of the automobile. He could scarcely see her white
figure, but he became aware again of the delightful and singular perfume of
her tawny hair. If Sylvia had spoken he never could have sat so close to her.
He had no business, anyway——
She snapped on the light. She laughed.
"I said you were bound to meet Lambert Planter."
He had started on false ground. At any moment the ground might give way.

"If I wasn't quite honest about that the other morning," he said, "it was
because I had met Lambert Planter, but under circumstances I wanted to
forget."
"I'm sorry," she said, softly, "that I reminded you; but he seemed glad to see
you this morning. It is all right now, isn't it?"
"Yes," he answered, doubtfully.
That thrilling quality of her voice became more pronounced.
"I'm glad. For he's a good friend to have. He's a very real person; I mean, a
man who's likely to do big things, don't you think?"
"Yes," he said again.
Why was he conscious of resentment? Why did he ask himself quickly if
Lambert thought of her with equal benevolence? He pulled himself up
short. What earthly business was it of his what Betty Alston and Lambert
Planter thought of each other? But he regretted the briefness of his
companionship with Betty in the unaccustomed luxury of the car. It
surrounded him with a settled and congenial atmosphere; it lessened, after
the first moments, the sharp taste of the ambition to which he had
condemned himself.
"Don't worry," she said, as he descended at his lodging, "you'll get in. Dear
old Squibs told me so."
He experienced a strong impulse to touch her hand again. He thanked her,
said good-night, and turned resolutely away.
It was only after long scrutiny of Sylvia's photograph that he attacked
Bailly's marked passages. Again and again he reminded himself that he had
actually seen her that day, and that she had either not remembered him, or
had, with a deliberate cruelty, sought to impress him with his ugly
insignificance in a crowded and pleasurable landscape.
Then why should this other girl of the same class treat him so differently?
The answer came glibly. For that instant he was wholly distasteful to
himself.

"Because she doesn't know."
He picked up a piece of the broken riding crop, flushing hotly. He would
detach himself from the landscape for Sylvia. He would use that crop yet.

X

He worked all the next day in the examination hall. He purposely chose a
seat in the row behind Goodhue. Five or six men, clearly all friends of
Goodhue's, sat near him, each modelled more or less as he was. George
noticed one exception, a short fellow who stood out from the entire room.
At first George thought it was because he was older, then he decided it was
the light moustache, the thick hair, the eyes that lacked lustre, the long,
white fingers. The man barely lifted his examination sheets. He glanced at
them once, then set to work. He was the first to rise and hand his papers in.
The rest paused, stared enviously, and sighed. George heard Goodhue say to
the man next him:
"How do you suppose Spike does it?"
George wondered why they called the dainty little man Spike.
He was slow and painstaking himself, and the room was fairly well emptied
before he finished. Except for the French, he was satisfied. He took a deep
breath. The ordeal was over. For the first time in more than two months he
was his own master. He could do anything he pleased.
First of all, he hurried to Squibs Bailly.
"Lend me a novel—something exciting," he began. "No, I wouldn't open a
text-book even for you to-night. The schedule's dead and buried, sir, and
you haven't given me another."
Bailly's wrinkled face approved.
"You wouldn't be coming at me this way if there was any doubt. You shall
have your novel. I'm afraid——"
He paused, laughing.

"I mean, my task with you is about done. You've more brain than a dinosaur.
It is variously wrinkled where once it was like a babe's. Except for the
French, you should handle your courses without superhuman effort. Don't
ever let me hear of your getting a condition. Your next schedule will come
from Stringham and Green."
He limped to a bookcase and drew out a volume bound in red.
"Without entirely wasting your time, you may amuse yourself with that."
"'Treasure Island.'"
George frowned doubtfully.
"We studied something about this man. If he's good enough to get in the
school books maybe he isn't just what I'm looking for to-night."
"Have you ever perused Nick Carter, or, perhaps Old Sleuth?" Bailly asked.
George smiled.
"I know I have to forget all that."
"In intellectual circles," Bailly agreed.
He glanced slyly around.
"I've scanned such matter," he whispered, "with a modicum of enjoyment,
so I can assure you the book you have in your hand possesses nearly equal
merit, yet you may discuss it without losing caste in the most exalted
places; which would seem to indicate that human judgment is based on
manner rather than matter."
"You mean," George said, frowning, "that if a man does a rotten thing it is
the way he does it rather than the thing itself that is judged?"
Bailly limped up and down, his hands behind his back. He faced George
with a little show of bewildered temper.
"See here, Freshman Morton, I've taught you to think too fast. You can't
fasten a scheme of ethics on any silly aphorism of mine. Go home and read
your book. Dwell with picturesque pirates, and walk with flawless and

touching virtue. Delve for buried treasure. That, at least, is always worth
while."
George's attitude was a challenge.
"Remembering," he said, softly, "to dig in a nice manner even if your hands
do get dirty."
Bailly sprawled in his chair and waved George away. "You need a
preacher," he said, "not a tutor."

XI

In his room George opened his book and read happily. Never in his life had
he been so relaxed and content. Entangled in the adventures of colourful
characters he didn't hear at first the sliding of stealthy feet in the hall,
whispered consultations, sly knockings at various doors. Then there came a
rap at his own door, and he glanced up, surprised, sweeping the photograph
and the broken crop into the table drawer.
"Come in," he called, not heartily.
A dozen young men crowded slowly into the room. They wore orange and
black jerseys and caps brilliant with absurd devices. They had the
appearance of judges of some particularly atrocious criminal. George had
no doubt that he was the man, for those were the days just before hazing
was frowned out of existence by an effete conservatism.
"Get up, you Freshman," one hissed. "Put on your hat and coat, and follow
us."
George was on the point of refusing, had his hands half up in fact, to give
them a fight; but a thrill entered his soul that he should be qualified as a
victim of such high-handed nonsense which acknowledged him as an entity
in the undergraduate world. He arose gladly, ready to obey. Then someone
grunted with disgust.
"Come on. Duck out of here."
"What for? This guy looks fresh as salt mackerel."

"It's Morton. We can't monkey with him."
The others expressed disappointment and thronged through the door in
search of victims more available. George became belligerent for an opposite
reason.
"Why not?" he demanded.
The leader smiled in friendly fashion.
"You'll get all the hazing you need down at the field."
As the last filed out and closed the door George smiled appreciation. Even
among the Sophomores he was spotted, a privileged and an important
character.
The next morning, packed with the nervous Freshmen in a lecture room, he
heard his name read out with the sections. He fought his way into the
university offices to scan the list of conditioned men. He didn't appear on a
single slip. He had even managed the easy French paper. He attended to the
formalities of matriculating. He was free to play football, to take up the by-
no-means considerable duties of the laundry agency, to make friends. He
had completed the first lap.
When he reported at the field that afternoon he found that the Freshmen had
a coach of their own, a young man who possessed the unreal violence of a
Sophomore, but he knew the game, and the extra invective with which he
drove George indicated that Stringham and Green had confided to him their
hopes.
The squad was large. Later it would dwindle and its members be thrown
into a more intimate contact. Goodhue was there, a promising quarterback.
Rogers toiled with a hopeless enthusiasm. George smiled, appreciating the
other's logic. It was a good thing to try for the team, even though one had
no chance of making it. As a matter of fact, Rogers disappeared at the first
weeding-out.
The opening fortnight was wholly pleasant—a stressing of fundamentals
that demanded little severe physical effort. Nor did the curriculum place any
grave demands on George. During the evenings he frequently supplemented

his work at the field with a brisk cross-country run, more often than not in
the vicinity of the Alston place. He could see the lights in the huge house,
and he tried to visualize that interior where, perhaps, men of the Goodhue
stamp sat with Betty. He studied those fortunates, meantime, and the other
types that surrounded him. There were many men of a sort, of the Rogers
sort particularly, who continually suggested their receptivity; and he was
invariably courteous—from a distance, as he had seen Goodhue respond to
Rogers. For George had his eyes focused now. He had seen the best.
The election of Freshmen class officers outlined several facts. The various
men put up for office were unknown to the class in general, were backed by
little crowds from their own schools. Men from less important schools, and
men, like George, with no preparatory past, voted wild. These school
groups, he saw, clung together; would determine, it was clear, the social
progress through college of their members. That inevitably pointed to the
upper-class club houses on Prospect Street. George had seen them from his
first days at University Field, but until now they had, naturally enough,
failed to impress him with any immediate interest. He desired the proper
contacts for the molding of his own deportment and, to an extent even
greater, for the bearing they would have on his battle for money and
position after he should leave college. But it became clear to him now that
the contest for Prospect Street had begun on the first day, even earlier, back
in the preparatory schools.
Were such contacts possible in a serviceable measure without success in
that selfish, headlong race? Was it practicable to draw the attention of the
eager, half-blind runners to one outside the sacred little groups? Football
would open certain doors, but if there was one best club he would have that
or nothing. It might be wiser to stand brazenly aloof, posing as above such
infantile jealousies. The future would decide, but as he left the place of the
elections he had an empty feeling, a sharpened appreciation of the hazards
that lay ahead.
Goodhue would be pointed for the highest. Goodhue would lead in many
ways. He was elected the first president of the class.
The poor or earnest men, ignorant of everything outside their books, come
from scattered homes, quite friendless, gravitated together in what men like

Rogers considered a social quarantine. Rogers, indeed, ventured to warn
George of the risk of contagion. As chance dictated George chatted with
such creatures; once or twice even walked across the campus with them.
"You're making a mistake," Rogers advised, "being seen with polers like
Allen."
"I've been seen with him twice that I can think of," George answered.
"Why?"
"That lot'll queer you."
George put his hand on Rogers' shoulder.
"See here. If I'm so small that that will queer me, you can put me down as
damned."
He walked on with that infrequently experienced sensation of having made
an advance. Yet he couldn't quite see why. He had responded to an instinct
that must have been his even in the days at Oakmont, when he had been less
than human. If he didn't see more of men like Allen it was because they had
nothing to offer him; nothing whatever. Goodhue had——
When their paths crossed on the campus now Goodhue nodded, for each
day they met at the field, both certainties, if they escaped injury, for the
Freshmen eleven.
Football had ceased to be unalloyed pleasure. Stringham that fall used the
Freshmen rather more than the scrub as a punching bag for the varsity. The
devoted youngsters would take punishment from three or four successive
teams from the big squad. They became, consequently, as hard as iron.
Frequently they played a team of varsity substitutes off its feet. George had
settled into the backfield. He was fast with the ball, but he found it difficult
to follow his interference, losing patience sometimes, and desiring to cut off
by himself. Even so he made consistent gains through the opposing line. On
secondary defence he was rather too efficient. Stringham was continually
cautioning him not to tackle the varsity pets too viciously. After one such
rebuke Goodhue unbent to sympathy.

"If they worked the varsity as hard as they do us Stringham wouldn't have
to be so precious careful of his brittle backs. Just the same, Morton, I would
rather play with you than against you."
George smiled, but he didn't bother to answer. Let Goodhue come around
again.
George's kicking from the start outdistanced the best varsity punts. The
stands, sprinkled with undergraduates and people from the town, would
become noisy with handclapping as his spirals arched down the field.
Squibs Bailly, George knew, was always there, probably saying, "I kicked
that ball. I made that run," and he had. The more you thought of it, the more
it became comprehensible that he had.
The afternoon George slipped outside a first varsity tackle, and dodged two
varsity backs, running forty yards for a touchdown, Squibs limped on the
field, followed by Betty Alston. The scrimmaging was over. The Freshmen,
triumphant because of George's feat, streaked toward the field house.
Goodhue ran close to George. Bailly caught George's arm. Goodhue
paused, calling out:
"Hello, Betty!"
At first Betty seemed scarcely to see Goodhue. She held out her hand to
George.
"That was splendid. Don't forget that you're going to make me congratulate
you this way next fall after the big games."
"I'll do my best. I want you to," George said.
Again he responded to the frank warmth of her fingers that seemed
unconsciously endeavouring to make more pliable the hard surface of his
mind.
"The strength of a lion," Bailly was saying, "united to the cruel cunning of
the serpent. Heaven be praised you didn't seek the higher education at Yale
or Harvard."
Betty called a belated greeting to Goodhue.

"Hello, Dicky! Wasn't it a real run? I feel something of a sponsor. I told him
before college opened he would be a great player."
Goodhue's surprise was momentarily apparent.
"It was rather nice to see those big fellows dumped," he said.
Betty went closer to him.
"Aren't you coming out to dinner soon? I'll promise Green you won't break
training."
The warm, slender fingers were no longer at George's mind. He felt
abruptly repulsed. He wanted only to get away. Her eyes caught his, and she
smiled.
"And bring Mr. Morton. I'm convinced he'll never come unless somebody
takes him by the hand."
George glanced at her hand. He had a whimsical impulse to reach out for it,
to close his eyes, to be led.
Heavy feet hurried behind the little group. A voice filled with rancour and
disgust cried out:
"You standing here without blankets just to enjoy the autumn breezes? You
ought to have better sense, Mr. Bailly."
"It's my fault, Green," Betty laughed.
"That's different," the trainer admitted, gallantly. "You can't expect a woman
to have much sense. Get to the showers now, and on the run."
Goodhue and George trotted off.
"I didn't know you were a friend of Betty Alston's," Goodhue said.
George didn't answer. Goodhue didn't say anything else.

XII

Often after those long, pounding afternoons George returned to his room,
wondering dully, as he had done last summer, why the deuce he did it.
Sylvia's picture stared the same answer, and he would turn with a sigh to
one of the novels Bailly loaned him regularly. Bailly was of great value
there, too, for he chose the books carefully, and George was commencing to
learn that as a man reads so is he very likely to think. Whenever he spoke
now he was careful to modulate his voice, to choose his words, never to be
heard without a reason.
The little fellow with the moustache whom the Goodhue crowd called Spike
met him on the campus one day after practice.
"My name," he announced in a high-pitched, slurred voice, "is Wandel. You
may not realize it, but you are a very great man, Morton."
George looked him over, astonished. He had difficulty not to mock the
other's manner, nearly effeminate.
"Why am I great, Mr. Wandel?"
"Anybody," Wandel answered in his singing voice, "who does one thing
better than others is inevitably great."
George smiled vindictively.
"I suppose I ought to return the compliment. What do you do?"
Wandel wasn't ruffled.
"Very many things. I brew good tea for one. What about a cup now? Come
to my rooms. They're just here, in Blair tower."
George weighed the invitation. Wandel was beyond doubt of the fortunates,
yet curiously apart from them. George's diplomacy required a forcing of the
fortunates to seek him. Wandel, for that matter, had sought. Where George
might have refused a first invitation from Goodhue he accepted Wandel's,
because he was anxious to know the man's real purpose in asking him.
"All right. Thanks. But I haven't much time. I want to do some reading
before dinner."

He hadn't imagined anything like Wandel's room existed in college, or could
be conceived or executed by one of college age. The study was large and
high with a broad casement window. The waning light increased the values
Wandel had evidently sought. The wall covering and the draperies at the
three doors and the window were a dead shade of green that, in fact,
suggested a withdrawal from life nearly supernatural, at least medieval. The
half-dozen pictures were designed to complete this impression. They were
primitives—an awkward but lovely Madonna, a procession of saints who
seemed deformed by their experiences, grotesque conceptions of biblical
encounters. There were heavy rugs, also green in foundation; and, with
wide, effective spaces between, stood uncomfortable Gothic chairs,
benches, and tables.
Two months ago George would have expressed amazement, perhaps
admiration. Now he said nothing, but he longed for Squibs' opinion of the
room. He questioned what it reflected of the pompous little man who had
brought him.
Wandel stooped and lighted the fire. He switched the heavy green curtains
over the window. In a corner a youth stirred and yawned.
"Hello, Dalrymple," Wandel said. "Waited long? You know that very great
man, Morton?"
The increasing firelight played on Dalrymple's face, a countenance without
much expression, intolerant, if anything, but in a far weaker sense than
Sylvia's assurance. George recognized him. He had seen him accompany
Goodhue through the crowd the day of the first examination. Dalrymple
didn't disturb himself.
"The football player? How do. Damn tea, Spike. You've got whiskey and a
siphon."
George's hand had been ready. He was thankful he hadn't offered it. In that
moment a dislike was born, not very positive; the emotion one has for an
unwholesome animal.
Wandel disappeared. After a moment he came in, wearing a fantastic
embroidered dressing gown of the pervading dead green tone. He lighted a
spirit lamp, and, while the water heated, got out a tea canister, cups, boxes

of biscuits, cigarettes, bottles, and glasses. Dalrymple poured a generous
drink. Wandel took a smaller one.
"You," he said to George, "being a very great man, will have some tea."
"I'll have some tea, anyway," George answered.
The door opened. Goodhue strolled in. His eyebrows lifted when he saw
George.
"Do you know you're in bad company, Morton?"
"I believe so," George answered.
Wandel was pleased. George saw Goodhue glance a question at Dalrymple.
Dalrymple merely stared.
They sat about, sipping, talking of nothing in particular, and the curious
room was full of an interrogation. George lost his earlier fancy of being
under Wandel's inspection. It was evident to him now that Wandel was the
man to do his inspecting first. Why the deuce had he asked him here?
Dalrymple and Goodhue were clearly puzzled by the same question.
When he had emptied his cup George rose and put on his cap.
"Thanks for the cup of tea, Wandel."
"Don't go," Wandel urged.
He waved his hands helplessly.
"But, since you're a very distinguished person, I suppose I can't keep you.
Come again, any day this time. Every day."
The question in Goodhue's eyes increased. Dalrymple altered his position
irritably, and refilled his glass. George didn't say good-bye, waiting for the
first move from him. Dalrymple, however, continued to sip, unaffected by
this departure.
Goodhue, on the other hand, after a moment's hesitation, followed George
out. When they had reached the tower archway Goodhue paused. The

broken light from an iron-framed lamp exposed the curiosity and indecision
in his eyes.
"Have you any idea, Morton," he asked, "what Spike's up to with you; I
mean, why he's so darned hospitable all of a sudden?"
George shook his head. He was quite frank.
"I'm not so dull," he said, "that I haven't been wondering about that myself."
Goodhue smiled, and unexpectedly held out his hand.
"Good-night, see you at the field to-morrow."
"Why," George asked as he released that coveted grasp, "do you call
Wandel 'Spike'?"
Goodhue's voice was uneasy in spite of the laugh with which he coloured it.
"Maybe it's because he's so sharp."

XIII

George saw a day or two later a professor's criticism in the Daily
Princetonian of the current number of the Nassau Literary Magazine.
Driggs Wandel, because of a poem, was excitedly greeted as a man with a
touch of genius. George borrowed a copy of the Lit from a neighbour, and
read a haunting, unreal bit of verse that seemed a part of the room in which
it had probably been written. Obsessed by the practicality of the little man,
George asked himself just what Wandel had to gain by this performance. He
carried the whole puzzle to Bailly that night, and was surprised to learn that
Wandel had impressed himself already on the faculty.
"This verse isn't genius," Bailly said, "but it proves that the man has an
abnormal control of effect, and he does what he does with no apparent
effort. He'll probably be managing editor of the Lit and the Princetonian,
for I understand he's out for that, too. He's going to make himself felt in his
class and in the entire undergraduate body. Don't undervalue him. Have you
stopped to think, Morton, that he still wears a moustache? Revolutionary!

Has he overawed the Sophomores, or has he too many friends in the upper
classes?"
Bailly limped up and down, ill at ease, seeking words.
"I don't know how to advise you. I believe he'll help you delve after some
treasure, though the stains on his own hands won't be visible. Whether it's
just the treasure you want is another matter. Be inscrutable yourself. Accept
his invitations. If you can, find out what he's up to without committing
yourself. You can put it down that he isn't after you for nothing."
"But why?" George demanded.
Bailly shrugged his narrow shoulders.
"Anyway, I've told you what I could, and you'll go your own way whether
you agree or not."
George did, as a matter of fact. His curiosity carried him a number of times
to Wandel's rooms. Practically always Dalrymple sat aloof, sullenly sipping
whiskey which had no business there. He met a number of other men of the
same crowd who talked football in friendly enough fashion; and once or
twice the suave little fellow made a point of asking him for a particular day
or hour. Always Wandel would introduce him to some new man, offering
him, George felt, as a specimen to be accepted as a triumph of the Wandel
judgment. And in every fresh face George saw the question he continually
asked himself.
Wandel's campaign accomplished one result: Men like Rogers became more
obsequious, considering George already a unit of that hallowed circle. But
George wasn't fooled. He knew very well that he wasn't.
Goodhue, however, was more friendly. Football, after all, George felt, was
quite as responsible for that as Betty Alston or Wandel; for it was the
combination of Goodhue at quarter and George at half that accounted for
the team's work against the varsity, and that beat the Yale and the Harvard
Freshmen. Such a consistent and effectual partnership couldn't help drawing
its members closer out of admiration, out of joy in success, out of a
ponderable dependence that each learned to place upon the other. That

conception survived the Freshman season. George no longer felt he had to
be careful with Goodhue. Goodhue had even found his lodgings.
"Not palatial," George explained, "because—you may not know it—I am
working my way through college."
Goodhue's voice was a trifle envious.
"I know. It must give you a fine feeling to do that."
Then Betty's vague invitation materialized in a note which mentioned a date
and the fact that Goodhue would be there. Goodhue himself suggested that
George should call at his rooms that evening so they could drive out
together. George had never been before, had not suspected that Dalrymple
lived with Goodhue. The fact, learned at the door, which bore the two cards,
disquieted him, filled him with a sense nearly premonitory.
When he had entered in response to Goodhue's call his doubt increased. The
room seemed inimical to him, yet it was a normal enough place. What did it
harbour that he was afraid of, that he was reluctant even to look for?
Goodhue was nearly ready. Dalrymple lounged on a window seat. He
glanced at George languidly.
"Will say, Morton, you did more than your share against those Crimson
Freshmen Saturday."
George nodded without answering. He had found the object the room
contained for which he had experienced a premonitory fear. On one of the
two desks stood an elaborately framed replica of the portrait he himself
possessed of Sylvia Planter. Its presence there impressed him as a wrong,
for to study and commune with that pictured face he had fancied his unique
privilege. Nor did its presence in this room seem quite honest, for Sylvia, he
was willing to swear, wasn't the type to scatter her likenesses among young
men. George had an instinct to turn on Dalrymple and demand a history of
the print, since Goodhue, he was certain, wouldn't have placed it there
without authority. After all, such authority might exist. What did he know of
Sylvia aside from her beauty, her arrogance, and her breeding? That was it.
Her breeding made the exposure of her portrait here questionable.

"What you staring at?" Dalrymple asked, sullenly.
"Is this your desk?" George demanded.
"Yes. Why?"
George faced him abruptly.
"I was looking at that photograph."
"What for?" Dalrymple demanded, sitting up.
"Because," George answered, evenly, "it happens to be where one sees it."
Dalrymple flushed.
"Deuced pretty girl," he said with an affectation of indifference. "Of course
you don't know her."
"I have seen her," George said, shortly.
He felt that a challenge had been passed and accepted. He raised his voice.
"How about it, Goodhue?"
"Coming."
Dalrymple opened his mouth as if to speak, but Goodhue slipped into the
room, and George and he went down the stairs and climbed into Goodhue's
runabout.
"I didn't know," George said when they had started, "that you lived with
Dalrymple."
"We were put together at school, so it seemed simple to start out here."
George was glad to fancy a slight colour of apology, as if such a
companionship needed a reason.
It was a pleasant and intimate little dinner to which they drove. Mr. and
Mrs. Alston recollected meeting George at the Baillys', and they were kind
about his football. A friend of Betty's from a neighbouring house made the
sixth. George was not uncomfortable. His glass had shown him that in a

dinner suit he was rather better looking than he had thought. Observation
had diminished his dread of social lapses. There flowed, however, rather too
much talk of strange worlds, which included some approaching gaieties in
New York.
"You," Betty said casually to him, "must run up to my great affair."
Her aunt, it appeared, would engineer that a short time before the holidays.
George was vague. The prospect of a ballroom was terrifying. He had
danced very little, and never with the type of women who would throng
Betty Alston's 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.

XX

The cold weather placed a smooth black floor on Lake Carnegie. George
went down one evening with the Baillys. They brought Betty Alston, who
was just home from New York and had dined with them. A round moon
smiled above the row of solemn and vigilant poplars along the canal bank.
The shadows of the trees made you catch your breath as if on the edge of
perilous pitfalls.
Going down through the woods they passed Allen. Even in that yellow-
splashed darkness George recognized the bony figure.
"Been skating?" he called.
"Hello, Morton! No, I don't skate."
"Then," George laughed, "why don't you smash the ice?"
Allen laughed back mirthlessly, but didn't answer; and, as they went on,
Betty wanted to know what it was all about. George told her of Allen's visit.
"But congenial people," she said, "will always gather together. It would be
dreadful to have one's friends arbitrarily chosen. You'll go to a club with
your friends."
"But Allen says the poor men can't afford it," he answered. "I'm one of the
poor men."
"You'll always find a way to do what you want," she said, confidently.
But when they were on the lake the question of affording the things one
wanted slipped between them again.
George had a fancy that Mrs. Bailly guided her awkward husband away
from Betty and him. Why? At least it was pleasant to be alone with Betty,
gliding along near the bank, sometimes clasping hands at a half-seen,
doubtful stretch. Betty spoke of it.

"Where are my guardians?"
"Let's go a little farther," he urged. "We'll find them easily enough."
It didn't worry her much.
"Why did you come back so soon?" she asked.
He hesitated. He had hoped to avoid such questions.
"I haven't been away."
She glanced up, surprised.
"You mean you've been in Princeton through the holiday?"
"Yes, I feel I ought to go easy with what little I have."
"I knew you were working your way through," she said, "but I never
guessed it meant as much denial as that."
"Don't worry," he laughed, "I'll make money next summer."
"I wish I'd known. And none of your friends thought!"
"Why should they? They're mostly too rich."
"That's wrong."
"Are you driving me into Allen's camp?" he asked. "You can't; for I expect
to be rich myself, some day. Any man can, if he goes about it in the right
way. Maybe Allen doubts his power, and that's the reason he's against
money and the pleasant things it buys. Does it make any difference to you,
my being poor for a time?"
"Why should it?" she asked, warmly.
"Allen," he said, "couldn't understand your skating with me."
Why not tell Betty the rest in this frozen and romantic solitude they shared?
He decided not. He had risked enough for the present. When she turned
around he didn't try to hold her, skating swiftly back at her side, aware of a

danger in such solitude; charging himself with a scarcely definable
disloyalty to his conception of Sylvia.

XXI

He fancied Betty desired to make up for her thoughtlessness during the
holidays when she asked him for dinner on a Saturday night. With that
dinner, no matter what others might think of his lack of money and
background, she had put herself on record, for it was a large, formal party
sprinkled with people from New York, and drawing from the University
only the kind of men Allen was out to fight. Wandel, George thought, rather
disapproved of his being there, but as a result, he made two trips to parties
in New York during the winter. Both were failures, for he didn't meet
Sylvia, yet he heard of her always as a dazzling success.
He answered Dalrymple's cold politeness with an irritating indifference. In
the spring, however, he detected a radical alteration in Dalrymple's manner.
By that time, the scheme discussed carelessly at the Alstons' in the fall had
been worked out. On good afternoons, when their work allowed, a few men,
all friends of the Alstons, drove out, and, with passable ponies, played
practice matches at polo on the field Mr. Alston had had arranged. The
neighbours fell into a habit of concentrating there, and George was thrown
into intimate contact with them, seeing other gates open rather eagerly
before him, for he hadn't miscalculated his ability to impress with horses.
When Mr. Alston had first asked him he had accepted gladly. Because of his
long habit in the saddle and his accuracy of eye he played better from the
start than these other novices. As in football, he teamed well with Goodhue.
"Goodhue to Morton," Wandel complained, "or Morton to Goodhue. What
chance has a mere duffer like me against such a very distinguished
combination?"
It was during these games that Goodhue fell into the practice of shouting
George's first name across the field, and when George became convinced
that such familiarity was not chance, but an expression of a deepening
friendship, he responded unaffectedly. It was inevitable the others should
adopt Goodhue's example. Even Dalrymple did, and George asked himself

why the man was trying to appear friendly, for he knew that in his heart
Dalrymple had not altered.
It filled George with a warm and formless pleasure to hear Betty using his
Christian name, to realize that a precedent had this time been established;
yet it required an effort, filled him with a great confusion, to call her
familiarly "Betty" for the first time.
He chatted with her at the edge of the field while grooms led the ponies up
and down.
"What are your plans for the summer?" she asked.
"I don't quite know what will happen."
"We," she said, "will be in Maine. Can't you run up in August? Dicky
Goodhue's coming then."
He looked at her. He tried to hide his hunger for the companionship, the
relaxation such a visit would give. He glanced away.
"I wish I could. Have you forgotten I'm to make money? I've got to try to do
that this summer, Betty."
There, it was out. Colour stole into her white cheeks.
"I'm sorry," she said.
He had another reason for refusing. He was growing afraid of Betty. He was
conscious of an increasing effort to drive her memory from the little room
where Sylvia's portrait watched. It was, he told himself, because he didn't
see Sylvia oftener, couldn't feel his heart respond to the exciting enmity in
her brilliant eyes.
Goodhue and Dalrymple, it developed, were parting, amicably enough as
far as any one knew.
"Dolly thinks he'll room alone next year," was Goodhue's explanation.
Dalrymple explained nothing.
Driving back to town one afternoon Goodhue proposed to George that he
replace Dalrymple.

"Campus rooms," he said, "aren't as expensive as most in town."
He mentioned a figure. George thought rapidly. What an opportunity! And
aside from what Goodhue could do for him, he was genuinely fond of the
man. George craved absolute independence, and he knew Goodhue would
give him all of that he asked for.
"I'd like to," he said.
Goodhue smiled.
"That's splendid. I think we'll manage together."
Wandel frowned at the news. So did Allen. Allen came frequently now to
talk his college socialism. George listened patiently, always answering:
"I've made up my mind to nothing, except that I'll take my friends where I
find them, high or low. But I'm not against you, Allen."
Yet George was uneasy, knowing the moment for making up his mind
wouldn't be long delayed. He understood very well that already some men
knew to what club they'd go more than a year later. Secretly, perhaps
illegally, the sections for the clubs were forming in his class. Small groups
were quietly organizing under the guidance of the upper classes. During
Sophomore year these small groups would elect other men to the limit of
full membership. It was perfectly clear that unless he went in ahead of
Dalrymple his chances of making the club he wanted were worthless. As a
result of his talks with Allen, moreover, he felt that Wandel didn't want him.
If Wandel could persuade Goodhue that George could serve the interests of
the fortunates best from the outside the issue would be settled.
"But I won't be used that way," George decided. "I'm out for myself."
Along that straight line he had made his plans for the summer. Somehow he
was going to study the methods of the greatest financial market in the
country, so that later he could apply them serviceably to his own fortune.
Bailly had other ideas. One night while they lounged on the front campus
listening to senior singing the long tutor suggested that he take up some
form of manual labour.

"It would keep you in good condition," he said, "and it might broaden your
vision by disclosing the aims and the dissatisfactions of those who live by
the sweat of their brows."
George frowned.
"I know enough of that already. I've been a labourer myself. I haven't the
time, sir."
Bailly probably knew that he was dealing with a point of view far more
determined and mature than that of the average undergraduate. He didn't
argue, but George felt the need of an apology.
"I've got to learn how to make money," he said.
"Money isn't everything," Bailly sighed.
"I've started after certain things," George justified himself. "Money's one of
them. I'll work for next to nothing this summer if I have to. I'll be a runner,
the man who sweeps out the office, anything that will give me a chance to
watch and study Wall Street. I'm sorry if you don't approve, sir."
"I didn't say that," Bailly answered, "but the fact was sufficiently clear."
Yet George knew perfectly well a few days later that it was Bailly who had
spoken about his ambition to Mr. Alston.
"Blodgett, I fancy," Mr. Alston said, "will offer you some small start."
He handed George a letter addressed to one Josiah Blodgett, of the firm of
Blodgett and Sinclair.
"Good luck, and good-bye until next fall."
"If you do change your mind——If you can manage it——" Betty said.
So George, two or three days before commencement, left Princeton for Wall
Street, and presented his letter.
The offices of Blodgett and Sinclair were gorgeous and extensive, raw with
marble, and shining with mahogany. They suggested a hotel in bad taste
rather than a factory that turned out money in spectacular quantities.

"Mr. Blodgett will see you," a young man announced in an awed voice, as if
such condescension were infrequent.
In the remote room where Blodgett lurked the scheme of furnishing
appeared to culminate. The man himself shared its ornamental grossness.
He glanced up, his bald head puckering half its height. George saw that
although he was scarcely middle-aged Blodgett was altogether too fat, with
puffy, unhealthily coloured cheeks. In such a face the tiny eyes had an
appearance nearly porcine. The man's clothing would have put an 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.

XXVII

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.

PART III
THE MARKET-PLACE

I

George left Princeton with a sense of flight. The reception of a diploma
didn't interest him, nor did the cheers he received class day or on the
afternoon of the Yale baseball game when, beneath a Japanese parasol, he
led the seniors in front of admiring thousands who audibly identified him
for each other.
The man that had done most for Princeton! He admitted he had done a good
deal for himself. Of course, Squibs was right and he was abnormally
selfish; only it was too bad Betty couldn't have thought so. He had tried to
make her and had failed, he told himself, because Betty couldn't understand
selfishness.
He avoided during those last days every chance of seeing her alone; but
even in the presence of others he was aware of an alteration in her manner,
to be traced, doubtless, to the night of his difficult confession. She was
kinder, but her eyes were often puzzled, as if she couldn't understand why
he didn't want to see her alone.
He counted the moments, anxious for Blodgett and the enveloping
atmosphere of his marble-and-mahogany office. That would break the last
permanent tie. He would return to Princeton, naturally, but for only a day or
two now and then, too short a time to permit its influences appreciably to
swerve him.
Without meaning to, he let himself soften on the very edge of his departure
when the class sang on the steps of Nassau Hall for the last time, then
burned the benches about the cannon, and in lock step, hands on shoulders,

shuffled slowly away like men who have accomplished the interment of
their youth.
A lot of these mourning fellows he would never meet again; but he would
see plenty of Goodhue and Wandel and other useful people. Why, then, did
he abruptly and sharply regret his separation from all the others, even the
submerged ones who had got from Princeton only an education taken like
medicine and of about as much value? In the sway of this mood, induced by
permanent farewells, he came upon Dalrymple.
"There's no point saying good-bye to you," George offered, kindly.
Of course not. They would meet each other in town too frequently, secreting
a private enmity behind publicly worn masks of friendship. George was
wandering on, but Dalrymple halted him. The man was a trifle drunk, and
the sentiment of the moment had penetrated his narrow mind.
"Not been very good friends, George, you and I."
Even then George shrank from his apologies, since he appreciated their
precise value.
"Why don't you forget it?" he asked, gruffly.
Dalrymple nodded, but George knew in the morning the other would regret
having said as much as he had.
Immediately after that sombre dissolution of the class George said good-bye
to the Baillys. Although it was quite late they sat waiting for him in the
study, neat and serene as it had been on that first day a hundred years ago.
The room was quite the same except that Bill Gregory's picture had lost
prominence while George's stood in the place of honour—an incentive for
new men, although George was confident Squibs didn't urge certain of his
qualities on his youngsters.
Squibs looked older to-night, nearly as old, George thought, as the
disgraceful tweeds which he still wore. Mrs. Bailly sat in the shadows.
George kissed her and sank on the sofa at her side. She put her hand out and
groped for his, clinging to his fingers with a sort of despair. For a long time
they sat without speaking. George put his arm around her and waited for

one or the other to break this silence which became unbearable. He couldn't,
because as he dreamed among the shadows there slipped into his mind the
appearance and the atmosphere of another room where three had sat without
words on the eve of a vital parting. Tawdry details came back of stove and
littered table and ungainly chairs, and of swollen hands and swollen eyes.
He had suffered an unbearable silence then because he had found himself
suddenly incapable of speaking his companions' language. With these two
the silence was more difficult, because there was too much to say—more
than ever could be said.
He started. Suppose Squibs at the very last should use his father's parting
words:
"It's a bad start, but maybe you'll turn out all right after all."
His lips tightened. Would it be any truer now than it had been then? For that
matter, would Squibs have cared for him or done as much for him, if he had
been less ambitious, if he had compromised at all?
One thing was definite: No matter what he did these two would never
demand his exile; and the old pain caught him, and he knew it was real, and
not a specious cover for his relief at not having to see his parents again. It
hurt—most of all his mother's acceptance of a judgment she should have
fought with all her soul.
He stroked the soft hand that clung to his. From that parting he had come to
the tender and eager maternal affection of this childless woman, and he
knew she would always believe he was right.
But she wanted him to have Betty——
He stood up. He was going away from home. She expressed that at the door.
"This is your home, George."
Bailly nodded.
"Never forget that. Don't let your ideas smoulder in your own brain. Come
home, and talk them over."

George kissed Mrs. Bailly. He put his hands on Bailly's narrow shoulders.
He looked at the young eyes in a wrinkled face.
"The thing that hurts me most," he muttered, "is that I haven't paid you
back."
"Perhaps not altogether," Bailly answered, gravely, "but someday you may."

II

The last thing George did before leaving his dismantled room, which for so
long had sheltered Sylvia's riding crop and her photograph, was to write this
little note to Betty:

Dear Betty:
It's simpler to go without saying good-bye.
G. M.

Then he was hustled through the window of the railroad train, out of
Princeton, and definitely into the market-place.
After the sentiment of the final days the crowding, unyielding buildings,
and the men that shared astonishingly their qualities, offered him a useful
restorative. He found he could approximate their essential hardness again.
The Street at times resembled the campus—it held so many of the men he
had learned to know at Princeton. Lambert was installed in his father's
marble temple. He caught George one day on the sidewalk and hustled him
to a luncheon club.
"I suppose I really ought to put you up here."
"Why?" George asked.
"Because I'm always sure of a good scrap with you. I missed not playing
against you in the Princeton game last fall. Now there's no more football for
either of us. I like scraps."

Blodgett, he chanced to mention later, had spent the previous week-end at
Oakmont. Blodgett had already bragged of that in George's presence. He
forgot the excellent dishes Lambert had had placed before him.
"Have you put Blodgett up here, too?" he asked in his bluntest manner.
Lambert shook his head.
"That's different."
"Not very honestly different," George said, attempting a smile.
"You mean," Lambert laughed, "because I've never asked you to Oakmont?
Under the circumstances——"
"I don't mean that," George said. "I mean Blodgett."
"I can only arrange my own likes and dislikes," Lambert answered, still
amused.
Then who at Oakmont liked the fat financier?
Rogers was in the street, too, selling bonds with his old attitude toward the
serious side of life, striving earnestly only to spy out the right crowd and to
run with it.
"Buy my bonds! Buy my bonds!" he would cry, coming into George's
office. "They're each and every one a bargain. Remember, what's a bargain
to-day may be a dead loss to-morrow, so buy before it's too late."
Goodhue planned to enter a stock exchange firm in the fall, and a lot of
other men from the class would come down then after a long rest between
college and tackling the world on twenty dollars a month. Wandel alone of
George's intimates rested irresolute. George, since he had taken two rooms
and a bath in the apartment house in which Wandel lived, saw him
frequently. He could easily afford that luxury, for each summer his balance
had grown, and Blodgett, now that he had George for as long as he could
keep him, was paying him handsomely, and flattering him by drawing on
the store of special knowledge his extended and difficult application had
hoarded.

To live in such a house, moreover, was necessary to his campaign, which,
he admitted, had lagged alarmingly. Sylvia had continued to avoid him. She
seemed to possess a special sense for the houses and the parties where he
would be, and when, in spite of this, they did meet, she tried to impress him
with a thorough indifference; or, if she couldn't avoid a dance, with a rigid
repulsion that failed to harmonize with her warm colouring and her
exquisite femininity.
Through some means he had to get on. His restless apprehension had
grown. Her departure for Europe with her mother fed the rumours that from
time to time had connected her name with eligible men. It was even hinted
now that her mother's eyesight, which reached to social greatness across the
Atlantic, was responsible for her celibacy.
"There'll be an announcement before she comes back," the gossip ran.
"They'll land a museum piece of a title."
George didn't know about that, but he did realize that unless he could
progress, one day a rumour would take body. He resented bitterly her
absence this summer, but if things would carry on until the fall he would
manage, he promised himself, to get ahead with Sylvia.
Wandel seemed to enjoy having George near, for, irresolute as he was, he
spent practically the entire summer in town. George, one night when they
had returned from two hours' suffering of a summer show, asked him the
reason. They smoked in Wandel's library.
"I can look around better here," was all Wandel would say.
"But Driggs! Those precious talents!"
Wandel stretched himself in an easy chair.
"What would you suggest, great man?"
George laughed.
"Do you write poetry in secret—the big, wicked, and suffering city, seen
from a tenth-story window overlooking a pretty park?"
Vehemently Wandel shook his head.

"You know what most of our modern American jinglers are up to—talking
socialism or anarchy to get themselves talked about. If only they wouldn't
apply such insincere and half-digested theories to their art! It's a little like
modern popular music—criminal intervals and measures against all the
rules. But crime, you see, is invariably arresting. My apologies to the fox-
trot geniuses. They pretend to be nothing more than clever mutilators; but
the jinglers! They are great reformers. Bah! They remind me of a naughty
child who proudly displays the picture he has torn into grotesque pieces,
saying: 'Come quick, mother, and see what smart little Aleck has done.'
You'll have to try again, George."
George glanced up. His face was serious.
"Don't laugh at me. I mean it. Politics."
"At Princeton I wasn't bad at that," Wandel admitted, smiling reminiscently.
"But politics mixes a man with an unlovely crowd—uncouth provincials, a
lot of them, and some who are to all purposes foreigners. Do you know, my
dear George, that ability to read and write is essential to occupying a seat in
the United States Senate? I was amazed the other day to hear it was so. You
see how simple it is to misjudge."
"Then there's room," George laughed, "for more honest, well-educated,
well-bred Americans."
"Seems to me," Wandel drawled, "that a little broad-minded practicality in
our politics would be more useful than bovine honesty. I could furnish that.
How should I begin?"
"You might get a start in the State Department," George suggested,
"diplomacy, a secretaryship——"
"For once you're wrong," Wandel objected. "In this country diplomacy is a
destination rather than a route. The good jobs are frequently given for
services rendered, or men pay enormous sums for the privilege of being
taken for waiters at their own functions. To start at the bottom——Oh, no. I
don't possess the cerebral vacuity, and you can only climb out of the
service."
"Just the same," George laughed, "you'd make a tricky politician."

Wandel puffed thoughtfully.
"You're a far-seeing, a far-going person," he said. "You are bound to be a
very rich man. You'll want a few practical politicians. Isn't it so? Never
mind, but it's understood if I ever run for President or coroner you'll back
me with your money bags."
George glanced about the room, as striking and costly in its French fashion
as the green study had been.
"You have all the money you need," he said.
"But I'd be a rotten politician," Wandel answered, "if I spent any of my own
money on my own campaigns. So we have an understanding if the occasion
should arise——"
With a movement exceptionally quick for him, suggesting, indeed, an
uncontrollable nervous reaction, Wandel sprang to his feet and went to the
window where he leant out. George followed him, staring over the park's
far-spread velvet, studded with the small but abundant yellow jewels of the
lamps.
"What is it, little man? It's insufferable in town. Why don't you go play by
the sea or in the hills?"
"Because," Wandel answered, softly, "I can't help the feeling that any
occasion may arise. I don't mean our little politics, George. Time enough for
them. I don't want to go. I am waiting."
George understood.
"You mean the murders at Sarajevo," he said. "You're over-sensitive. Run
along and play. Nothing will come of that."
"Tell me," Wandel said, turning slowly, "that you mean what you say. Tell
me you haven't figured on it already."
George shrugged his shoulders.
"You're discreet. All right. I have figured, because, if anything should come
of it, it offers the chance of a lifetime for making money. Mundy's put me in

touch with some useful people in London and Paris. I want to be ready if
things should break. I hope they won't. Honestly, I very much doubt if they
will. Even Germany will think twice before forcing a general war."
"But you're making ready," Wandel whispered, "on the off-chance."
George pressed a switch and got more light. It was as if a heavy shadow had
filled the delightful room.
"We're growing fanciful," he said, "seeing things in the dark. By the way,
you run into Dalrymple occasionally? I'm told he comes often to town."
Wandel left the window, nodding.
"How long can he keep it up?" George asked.
"I'm not a physician."
"No, no. I mean financially. I gather his family live up to what they have."
"I daresay it would pain them to settle Dolly's debts frequently," Wandel
smiled.
"Then," George said, slowly, "he is fairly sure to come to you—that is, if
this keeps up."
"Why," Wandel asked, "should I encourage Dolly to be charitable to rich
wine agents and under-dressed females?"
George shook his head.
"If he asks you for help don't send him to the money lenders. Send him
discreetly to me. If I didn't have what he'd want, I daresay I could get it."
Wandel stared, lighting another cigarette.
"I'd like to keep him from the money lenders," George said, easily.
He didn't care whether Wandel thought him a forgiving fool or a calculating
scoundrel. Goodhue and Wandel had long since seen that he had been put
up at a number of clubs. The two had fancied they could control
Dalrymple's resentments. George, following his system, preferred a whip in

his own hand. He harboured no thought of revenge, but he did want to be
able to protect himself. He would use every possible means. This was one.
"We'll see," Wandel said. "It's too bad great men don't get along with little
wasters."

III

More than once George was tempted to follow Sylvia, trusting to luck to
find means of being near her. Such a trip might, indeed, lead to profit if the
off chance should develop. Still that could be handled better from this side,
and it was, after all, a chance. He must trust to her coming back as she had
gone. His place for the present was with Blodgett and Mundy.
The chance, however, was at the back of his head when he encountered
Allen late one hot night in a characteristic pose in Times Square. Allen still
talked, but his audience of interested or tolerant college men had been
replaced by hungry, ragged loafers and a few flushed, well-dressed males of
the type that prefers any diversion to a sane return home. Allen stood in the
centre of this group. His arms gestured broadly. His angular face was
passionate. From the few words George caught his sympathy for these
failures was beyond measure. He suggested to them the beauties of
violence, the brilliancies of the social revolution. The loafers commented.
The triflers laughed. Policemen edged near.
"Free liquor!" a voice shrilled.
Allen shook his fist, and continued. The proletariat would have to take
matters into its own hands.
"Fine!" a hoarse and beery listener shouted, "but what'll the cops say about
it?"
The edging policemen didn't bother to say anything at first. They quietly
scattered the scarecrows and the laggards. They indicated the advisability of
retreat for the orator. Then one burst out at Allen.
"God help the proletariat if I have to take it before McGloyne at the station
house."

And George heard another sneer:
"Social revolution! They've been trying to throw Tammany out ever since I
can remember."
George got Allen away. The angular man was glad to see him.
"You look overworked," George said. "Come have a modest supper with
me."
Allen was hungry, but he managed to grumble discouragement over his
food.
"They laugh. They'll stop listening for the price of a glass of beer."
"Maybe," George said, kindly, "they realize it's no good trying to help
them."
"They've got to be helped," Allen muttered.
"Then," George suggested, "put them in institutions, but don't expect me
nor any one else to approve when you urge them to grab the leadership of
the world. You must have enough sense to see it would mean ruin. I know
they're not all like this lot, but they're all a little wrong or they wouldn't
need help."
"It's because they've never had a chance," Allen protested.
It came to George that Allen had never had a chance either, and he
wondered if he, too, could be led aside by the price of a glass of beer.
"You all want what the other fellow's got," he said. "From that one motive
these social movements draw the bulk of their force. A lot for nothing is a
perfect poor man's creed."
"You're a heathen, Morton."
"That is, a human being," George said, good naturedly. "You're another,
Allen, but you won't acknowledge it."
Because he believed that, George took the other's address. Allen was loyal,
aggressive, and extraordinarily bright, as he had proved at Princeton. It

might be convenient to help him. Besides, he hated to see a man he knew so
well waste his time and look like a fool.

IV

By late July the off chance had pretty thoroughly defined itself except to the
blind. Blodgett, however, was still skeptical. He thought George's plans
were sound, provided a war should come. But there wouldn't be any war.
His correspondents were optimistic.
"Have I your permission to use Mundy in his off time?" George asked.
"As far as I'm concerned," Blodgett said, "Mundy can play parchesi in his
off time."
George telephoned Lambert Planter and sent a telegram to Goodhue. He
took them to luncheon and had Mundy there, too. He outlined his plans for
the formation of the firm of Morton, Planter, and Goodhue.
"He's called the turn of the cards," Mundy offered.
Such cards as he possessed George placed on the table. He furnished the
idea, and the preliminary organization, and what money he had. He took,
therefore, the major share of the profits. The others would give what time to
the business they could, but it was their money he wanted, and the credit
their names would give the firm. Mundy and he had made lists of buyers
and sellers. No man in the Street was better equipped than Mundy to pick
such a force. If Lambert and Goodhue agreed, these men could be collected
within a week. Some would go to Europe. Others would scatter over the
United States. It would cost a lot, but it meant an immeasurable amount in
return, for the war was inevitable.
Goodhue and Lambert were as skeptical as Blodgett, but they agreed to give
him what he needed to get his organization started. By that time, he
promised them, they would see how right he was, and then he could use
more of their money.
"It's the nearest I've ever come to gambling," he thought as he left them.
"Gambling on a war!"

Because of his confidence, before a frontier had been crossed he had bought
or contracted for large quantities of shoes and cloths and waterproofing. He
had taken options on stock in small and wavering automobile concerns, and
outlying machine shops and foundries, some of them already closed down,
some struggling along without hope.
"If the war lasts a month," he told his partners, "those stocks will come
from the bottom of nothing to the sky."
Goodhue became thoroughly interested at last. He cancelled his vacation
and installed himself in the offices George had rented in Blodgett's building.
With the men Mundy had picked, and under Mundy's tutelage, he took
charge of the routine. George went to Blodgett the first of August.
"I want to quit," he said. "I've got a big thing. I want to give it all my time."
Blodgett mopped his face. His grin was a little sheepish.
"I want to invest some money in your firm," he jerked out.
"I can use it," George said.
"You've got Goodhue there," Blodgett went on in a complaining way, "and
Mundy's working nights for you. Don't desert an old man without notice. I'll
give you plenty of time upstairs. Other things may come off here. I can use
you."
"If you want to pay me when you know my chief interest is somewhere
else," George said, "it's up to you."
"When I think I'm getting stung I'll let you know," Blodgett roared.
George sent for Allen, and urged him to go to London to open an office
with an expert Lambert had got from his father's marble temple. Allen
would be a check on the more experienced men whose scruples might not
stand the temptations of this vast opportunity. Allen said he couldn't do it;
couldn't abandon the work he had already commenced.
"There'll be precious little talk of socialism," George said, "until this thing
is over. It's a great chance for a man to study close up the biggest change the
world has ever undergone. Those fellows will want everything, and I'll give

them everything I can lay my hands on. I'm ahead of a lot of jobbers here.
I'll pay you well to see I don't get robbed on that side. Come on. Take a shot
at hard facts for a change."
Allen gasped at the salary George mentioned. He hesitated. He went.
George was glad to have helped him. He experienced also an ugly sense of
triumph. He felt that he wanted to tell Squibs Bailly right away.
Sylvia and her mother, he heard later, had come home out of the turmoil,
unacquainted with the discomforts of people who had travelled without the
Planter prestige. Whether the war was to blame or not, she had returned
without a single rumour touching fact. He didn't see her right away, because
she clung to Oakmont. More and more, as his success multiplied, keeping
pace with the agony in Europe, he longed to see her. All at once a return to
Oakmont was, in a sense, forced upon him, but he went without any thought
of encountering Sylvia, hoping, indeed, to avoid her.
It was like his mother to express her letter with telegraphic bluntness
without, however, going to the expense of actually wiring. Where he had
expected her customary stiff gratitude for money sent he found a scrawled
announcement of his father's death, and her plans for the funeral the
following afternoon.
"Of course you won't come," she ended.
Yet it seemed to him that he should go, to arrange her future. This was the
moment to snap the last enslaving tie between the Mortons and Oakmont.
There was, of course, the chance of running into Sylvia, or some visitor
who might connect him with the little house. Suppose Dalrymple, for
example, should be staying with the Planters as he often did? George
shrugged his shoulders. Things were coming rather rapidly to him. Besides,
it was extremely unlikely that any one from the great house would see the
Morton ceremony. The instincts of those people would be to avoid such
sights.

V

About his return there was a compelling thrill. He drove from the station in
one of the cheap automobiles that had made his father practically a

pensioner of the Planters. With an incredulous appreciation that he had once
accepted its horizon as the boundary of his life, he examined the familiar
landscape and the scar made upon it by the village. Curtly he refused to
satisfy the driver's curiosity. He had some business at the little house on the
Planter estate.
There, through the nearly stripped trees, it showed, almost audibly
confessing its debt to the Planter carpenters, painters, and gardeners. In a
clouded light late fall flowers waved from masses of dead leaves. Their gay
colours gave them an appearance melancholy and apprehensive.
Here he was back at last, and he wasn't going in at the great gate.
He walked around the shuttered house and crossed the porch where his
father had liked to sit on warm evenings. He rapped at the door. Feet
shuffled inside. The door swayed open, and his mother stood on the
threshold. Most of the changes had come to him, but in her red eyes
sparkled a momentary and mournful importance. At first she didn't
recognize her son.
"What is it?"
George stooped and kissed her cheek.
"I'm sorry, Mother."
Instead of holding out her arms she drew away, staring with fascination, a
species of terror, at his straight figure, at his clothing, at his face that
wouldn't coarsen now. When she spoke her voice suggested a placating of
this stranger who was her son.
"I didn't think you'd come. I can't believe you're George—my Georgie."
Over her shoulders in the shadowed house he saw the inquisitive faces of
women. It was clear that for them such an arrival was more divertive than
the sharing of a sorrow that scarcely touched their hearts.
George went in. He remembered most of the faces that disclosed excitement
while fawning upon his prosperity. He received an unpleasant impression
that these poor and ignorant people concealed a dangerous envy, that they
would be glad to grasp in one moment, even of violence, all that it had

taken him years of difficult struggle to acquire. Whether that was so or not
they ought not to stand before him as if his success were a crown. He tried
to keep contempt from his voice.
"Please sit down. I want to talk to my mother. Where——"
With slow steps she crossed the kitchen and opened the door of the parlour,
beckoning. He followed, knowing what he would find in that
uncomfortable, gala room of the poor.
He closed the door. In the half light he saw standing on trestles an oblong
box altogether too large for the walls that seemed to crowd it. He had no
feeling that anything of his father was there. He realized with a sense of
helpless regret that all that remained to him of that unhappy man were the
ghosts of such emotions as avarice, fear, and the instinct to sacrifice one's
own flesh and blood for a competence.
"Why don't you look at him, George?"
"I don't think he'd care to have me looking at him now."
She wiped her eyes.
"You are too bitter against your father. After all, he was a good man."
"Why should death," he asked her, musingly, "make people seem better than
they were in life? It isn't so."
"That's wicked. If your father could rise——"
His attention was caught by an air of pointing the oblong box had, as if to
something infinitely farther than ambition and success, yet so close it
angered him he couldn't see or touch it. His father had gone there, beyond
the farthest horizon of all. Old Planter couldn't make trouble for him now.
He was quite safe.
Over in Europe, he reflected, they didn't have enough coffins.
The oblong box for the first time made him think of that war, that was
making him rich, in terms of life instead of dollars and cents. He felt
dissatisfied.

"There should be more light here," he said, defensively.
But his mother shook her head.
He arranged a chair for her and sat near by while they discussed the details
of her departure. She let him see that she shrank from leaving the house,
against which, nevertheless, she had bitterly complained ever since Old
Planter had got it. Evidently she wanted to linger in her familiar rut,
awaiting with the attitude of a martyr whatever fate might offer. That was
the reason people had to be helped, because they preferred vicious inertia to
the efforts and risks of change. Then why did they want the prizes of those
who had had the courage to go forth and fight? Why couldn't Squibs see
that?
Patiently George told her she needn't worry about money again. She had a
sister who years ago had married and moved West to a farm that was not
particularly flourishing. Undoubtedly her sister would be glad to have her
and her generous allowance. So his will overcame his mother's reluctance to
help herself. She glanced up.
"Who is that?"
He listened. The women in the kitchen were standing again. Light feet
crossed the floor.
"Maybe somebody from the big house," his mother whispered. "They sent
Simpson last night."
For a moment the entire building was as silent as the oblong box. Then the
door opened.
Sylvia Planter slipped in and closed the door.
George caught his breath, studying her as she hesitated, accustoming herself
to the insufficient light. She wore a broad-brimmed hat that gave her the
charm and the grace of a portrait by Gainsborough. When she recognized
him, indeed, she seemed as permanently caught as a portrait.
"Miss Sylvia!" his mother worshipped.

"They told me I would find you here," Sylvia said, uncertainly. "I didn't
know——"
She broke off, biting her lip. George strolled around the oblong box to the
window, turning there with a slow bow. Even across that desolate, dead
shell, the obstinate distaste and the challenge were lively in her glance.
"It was very kind of you to come," he said.
But he was sorry she had come. To see him in such surroundings was a
stimulation of the ugly memories he had struggled to destroy. He read her
instinct to hurt him now as she had hurt the impertinent man, Morton, who
had lived in this house.
"When one of our people is in trouble——" she began, deliberately. "I
thought I might be of some help to your mother."
Even over the feeling of security George had just tried to give her the old
menace reached the uneasy woman.
"You—you remember him, Miss Sylvia?"
"Very well," Sylvia answered. "He used to be my groom."
"The title comes from you," George said, dryly.
His mother's glance fluttered from one to the other. What did she expect—
Old Planter stalking in to carry out his threats?
"After all these years I scarcely knew him myself."
Sylvia's colour heightened. He appraised her rising temper.
"Bad servants," he said, "linger in good employers' memories."
"I know, Miss Sylvia," his mother burst out, "that he wasn't to come back
here, but——"
She unclasped her nervous hands. One indicated the silent cause of his
disobedience. George moved toward the door. Sylvia stepped quickly aside.
He felt, like a physical wave, her desire to hurt.

"At such a time," she said, "it's natural he should come back to his home. I
think my father would be glad to have him with his mother."
George shrugged his shoulders, slipped out, navigated the shoals of
whispering women, and reached the clean air. He buttoned his overcoat and
shuffled through the dead leaves beneath the trees until he found himself at
the spot where Lambert and he had fought. He recalled his hot boasts of that
day. Fulfilment had seemed simple enough then. The scene just submitted
reminded him how short a distance he had actually travelled.
He knew she would pass that way on her return to the big house, so he
waited, and when he heard her feet disturbing the dead leaves he didn't turn.
She came closer than he had expected, and he heard her contralto voice,
quick and defiant:
"I hadn't expected to see you. I didn't quite realize what I was saying. I
should have had more respect for any one's grief."
Having said that, she was going on, but he turned and stopped her. As he
looked at her he reflected that everything had altered since that day—she
most of all. Then the woman had been a little visible in the child. Now, he
fancied, the child survived in the woman only through the persistence of
this old quarrel. He stared at her lips, recalling his boast that no man should
touch them unless it were George Morton. He was no nearer them than he
had been that day. Unless he got nearer some man would. It was incredible
that she hadn't married. She would marry.
"In the sense you mean, I have no grief," he said.
"Then I needn't have bothered. I once said you were a—a——"
"Something melodramatic. A beast, I think it was," he answered. "If you
don't mind I'll walk on with you for a little way."
"No," she said.
"If you please."
"You've no perception," she cried, angrily.

"Don't you think it time," he suggested, "that you ceased treating me like a
groom? It isn't very convincing to me. I doubt if it is to you. I fancy it's
really only your pride. I don't see why you should have so much where I am
concerned."
Her hand made a quick gesture of repulsion.
"You've not changed. You may walk on with me while I tell you this: If you
were like the men I know and can be friends with you'd leave me alone.
Will you stop this persecution? It comes down to that. Will you stop forcing
me to dance with you, to listen to you?"
He smiled, shaking his head.
"I'll make you dance with me more than ever. I've seen very little of you
lately. I hope this winter——"
She stopped, facing him, her cheeks flaming.
"You see! You remind me every time I meet you of just what you are, just
what you came from, just what you said and did that day."
"That is my aim," he smiled.
He moved his hand in the direction of the little house.
"When we're all like that will it make much difference who our fathers and
mothers were?"
She shivered. She started swiftly away.
"Miss Planter!"
The unexpectedness of the naked command may have brought her around.
He walked to her.
"When will you realize," he asked, "that it is unforgivable to turn your back
on life?"
Had he really meant to suggest that she could possess life only through
him? Doubtless the sublime effrontery of that interpretation reached her.

She commenced to laugh, her colour rising. She glanced away, and her
laughter died.
"You may as well understand," he said, "that I am never going to leave you
alone."
She started across the leaf-strewn grass. He kept pace with her.
"Are you going to force me to make a scene?" she asked.
"Except with your father," he said, "I don't think it would make much
difference."
He felt that if she had had anything in her hands then she would have struck
at him.
"It's not because I'm a beast," he said, quietly, "that I have no grief for my
father. He was through. Life had nothing to offer him. He had nothing to
offer life. Don't think I'm incapable of grief. I experienced it the day I
thought you might be dead. That was because you had so much to offer life
—rather more than life had to offer you."
He saw her shrink from him but she walked on, repressing her pain and her
anger.
"Since I've known intimately girls of your class," he said, "I've realized that
not all of them would have turned and tried to wound as you did that day.
Some would have laughed. Some would have been sorry and sympathetic. I
don't think many would have made such a scene."
He smiled down at her.
"I want you to realize it is your own fault. You started this. I'm not scolding.
I'm glad you were such a little fury. Otherwise, I might have gone on
working for your father or for somebody else's father. But you're to blame
for my persistence, so learn to put up with it. As long as I keep the riding
crop with which you tried to cut my face I'll remember what I said I'd do,
and I'll do it."
She didn't answer, but if she tried to give him the impression she wasn't
listening she failed utterly.

Around a curve in the path came a bent, white old man, bundled in a heavy
muffler and coat. In one hand he carried a thick cane. The other rested on
the arm of a young fellow of the private secretary stamp. There, George
acknowledged, advanced the single person with whom a scene might make
a serious difference, yet a more compelling thought crept in and overcame
his sense of danger. That was the type of man who made wars. That man,
indeed, was helping to finance this war. George was obsessed by the dun
day: by the leaves, fallen and rotten; by the memory of the oblong box.
Everything reminded him that not far away Death marched with a bland,
black triumph, greeting science as an ally instead of an enemy.
"Suppose," he mused, "America should get in this thing."
At last she spoke.
"What did you say? Do you see my father?"
He nodded.
"Wouldn't it be wiser," she asked, "to leave me alone?"
"Your father," he said, "looks a good deal older."
Old Planter had, in fact, gone down hill since George's last glimpse of him
in New York, or else he didn't attempt here to assume a strength he no
longer possessed. He was quite close before he gave any sign of seeing the
pair, and then he muttered to his secretary who answered with a whisper. He
limped up and took Sylvia's hand.
"Where has my little girl been?"
She laughed harshly.
"To a rendezvous in the forest. You shouldn't let me go out alone."
Planter glanced from clouded eyes at George. His lips between the white
hair smiled amiably.
"I don't believe I remember——"
"It's one of Lambert's business friends," Sylvia said, hastily. "Mr. Morton."

The old man shifted his cane and held out his hand.
"Lambert," he joked, "says he's going to make more money through you
than I can hope to leave him. You seem to have got the jump on a lot of
shrewd men. I'll see you at dinner? Lambert isn't coming to-night?"
George briefly clasped the hand of the big man.
"I must go back to town this afternoon."
"Then another time."
Planter shifted his cane and leant again on his secretary.
"Let's get on, Straker. Doctor's orders."
"Why," George asked when Sylvia and he were alone, "didn't you spring at
the chance?"
"I prefer to fight my own battles," she said, shortly.
"Don't you mean," he asked, quizzically, "that you're a little ashamed of
what you did that day?"
She shook her head.
"I was a frightened child. I have changed."
"Isn't it," he laughed, "a little because I, too, have changed? It never
occurred to your father to connect me with the Mortons living on his place."
Again she shook her head, turning away. He held out his hand.
"I must go back. Let's admit we've both changed. Let us be friends."
She didn't answer. She made no motion to take his hand.
"One of the promises I made that day," he reminded her, "was to teach you
not to be afraid of my touch."
"Does it amuse you to threaten me?" she asked.

Suddenly he reached out, caught her right hand before she could avoid him,
and gave it a quick pressure.
"Of course you're right," he laughed. "Actions are more useful than threats."
While she stared, flushed and incredulous, at the hand he had pressed,
George walked swiftly away, tingling with life, back to the house of death.

VI

At the funeral he submitted to the amazed scrutiny of the country people.
They couldn't hurt him, because they impinged not at all on his world; but
he was relieved when the oblong box had been consigned to the place
reserved for it, and he could, after arranging the last details of his mother's
departure, take the train back to New York.
Blodgett didn't even bother to ask where he had been. He was content these
days to let George go his own way. He hadn't forgotten that the younger
man had seen farther off than he the greatest opportunity for money making
the world had ever offered the greedy. He personally was more interested in
the syndicating of foreign external loans. The Planters weren't far from the
head of that movement, and George rather resented his stout employer's
working hand in hand with the Planters. George longed to ask him how
often he was trying to appear graceful at Oakmont these days.
The firm of Morton, Planter, and Goodhue had grown so rapidly that it took
practically all of George's and Lambert's time. Mundy, to whom George had
given a small interest, asked Blodgett if he couldn't leave to devote himself
entirely to the offices upstairs.
"Go to it," Blodgett agreed, good naturedly. "Draw your profits and your
salary from Morton after this."
George mulled over the sacrifice. Did it mean that Blodgett was so close to
the Planters that a merger was possible?
"There's no use," he told Blodgett. "I'm earning practically nothing in your
office, because I'm never here. I want to resign."

"Run along, sonny," Blodgett said. "Your salary is a small portion of the
profits your infant firm is bringing me. I like you around the office once a
day. Old Planter hasn't fired his boy, has he, and he's upstairs all the time,
and he's taken over some of the old man's best clerks."
"He's Mr. Planter's son," George reminded him.
"And ain't you like a good son to me," the other leered, "making money for
papa Blodgett?"
"Why did you let Mundy go so peacefully?" George asked, suspiciously.
"Because," Blodgett said, "he's been here a good many years, and he can
make more money this way. Didn't want to stand in his light, and I had
somebody in view."
But George wouldn't credit Blodgett with such altruism. Why was the man
so infernally good natured, exuding an oily content? Goodhue hinted at a
reason one day when they were talking of Sinclair and his lack of interest in
the office.
"I've heard rather privately," Goodhue said, "that Sinclair got pretty badly
involved a few months ago. If it hadn't been for Blodgett he'd have gone on
the rocks a total wreck. Josiah puffed up and towed him away whole.
Naturally Sinclair and his lady are grateful. I daresay this winter Blodgett's
receiving invitations he's coveted, and if he gives any parties himself he'll
have some of the people he's always wanted."
George hid his disapproval. Blodgett didn't even have a veneer. Money was
all he could offer. And was Sinclair a great fool, or Blodgett the cleverest
man in Wall Street, that Sinclair didn't know who had involved him and
why?
As a matter of fact, Blodgett did appear at several dances, wobbling about
the room to the discomfort of slender young things, getting generally in
everyone's way. George hated to see him attempting to dance with Sylvia
Planter. Sylvia seemed rather less successful in avoiding him than she did in
keeping out of George's way. Until Blodgett's extraordinary week-end in
February, indeed, George didn't have another chance to speak to her alone.

"Of course you'll come, George," Blodgett said. "If this weather holds
there'll be skating and sleighing—horses always, if you want 'em; and a lot
of first-class people."
"Who?" George asked.
"How about another financial chick—one of your partners?"
"Lambert Planter?"
The puffy face expanded.
"And the Sinclairs, because I'm a bachelor, and——"
But, since he could guess Sylvia would be there, George didn't care for any
more names. He wondered why Lambert or his sister should go. Had her
attitude toward the fat, coarse man conceivably altered because of his
gambolling at Oakmont? While he talked business with Mundy, Lambert,
and Goodhue, George's mind was distracted by a sense of imponderable
loss. Was it the shadow of what Sylvia had lost by accepting such an
invitation?
He didn't go until Saturday afternoon—there was too much to occupy him
at the office. This making money out of Europe's need had a good deal
constricted his social wanderings. It was why he hadn't frequently seen
Dalrymple close enough for annoyance; why he had met Betty only briefly
a very few times. He hadn't expected to run into either of them at Blodgett's,
but both were there. Betty was probably Lambert's excuse for rushing out
the night before.
George felt sorry for Mrs. Sinclair. Still against the corpulent crudities of
her host she could weigh the graces of his guests. It pleased George that her
greeting for him should be so warm.
The weather, too, had been considerate of Blodgett, refraining from injuring
his snow or ice. A musical and brassy sleigh met George at the station.
Patches of frosty white softened the lines of the house and draped the self-
conscious nudity of the sculpture in the sunken garden.
"And it'll snow again to-night, sir," the driver promised, as if even the
stables pulled for the master's success.

Everyone was out, but it was still early, so George asked for a horse and
hurried into his riding clothes. He had been working rather too hard
recently. The horse a groom brought around was a good one, and by no
means overworked. George was as eager as the animal to limber up and go.
Off they dashed at last along a winding bridle-path, broken just enough to
give good footing. The war, and his share of helping the allies—at a price;
his uncomfortable fear that the Baillys didn't like him to draw success from
such a disaster; his disapproval of Sylvia's coming here—all cleared from
his head as he galloped or trotted through the sharp air.
One thing: Blodgett hadn't spoiled these woodland bridle-paths; yet George
had a sensation of always looking ahead for a nude marble figure at a
corner, or an urn elaborately designed for simple flowers, or some iron
animals to remind a hunter that Blodgett knew what a well-bred forest was
for. Instead he saw through the trees ice swept clear of snow across which
figures glided with joyful sounds.
"Some of his flashy guests," George thought.
He rode slowly to the margin of the pond, which shared the colour of the
sky. Several of the skaters cried greetings. He recognized Dalrymple then,
skating with a girl. Dalrymple veered away, waving a careless hand,
Lambert came on, fingers locked with Betty's, and scraped to a halt at the
pond's edge.
"So the war's stopped for the week-end at last?" Lambert called.
"I wondered if you'd come at all," Betty cried.
George dismounted, smothering his surprise.
"A men and youths' general furnisher," he said, "has to stick pretty much to
the store. I never dreamed of seeing you here, Betty."
Perhaps Lambert caught George's real meaning.
"She's staying with Sylvia," he explained, "so, of course, she came."
George mounted and rode on, his mood suddenly as sunless as the declining
afternoon. Those two still got along well enough. Certainly it was time for a
rumour to take shape there. He had a sharp appreciation of having once

been younger. Suppose, because of his ambition, he should see all his
friends mate, leaving him as rich as Blodgett, and, like him, unpaired? He
quickened the pace of his horse. It was inconceivable. No matter what
Sylvia did he would never slacken his pursuit. In every other direction he
had forged ahead. Eventually he would in that one. Then why did it hurt
him to picture Betty gone beyond his reach?
He crossed the Blodgett boundaries, and entered a country road as
undisturbed and enticing as the private bridle-paths had been. He took
crossroads at random, keeping only a sense of direction, trying to
understand why he was sorry he had to be with Betty when he had come
only to be near Sylvia.
The thickening dusk warned him, and he chose a road leading toward
Blodgett's. First he received the horseman's sense of something ahead of
him. Then he heard the muffled tread of horses in the snow, and
occasionally a laugh.
"More of Josiah's notables," he hazarded.
He put spurs to his horse, and in a few minutes saw against the snow three
dark figures ambling along at an easy trot. When he had come closer he
knew that two of the riders were men, the other a woman. It was easy
enough to identify Blodgett. A barrel might have ridden so if it had had legs
with which to balance itself; and that slender figure was probably the
trapped Sinclair. George hurried on, his premonition assuming ugly lines of
reality. Even at that distance and from the rear he guessed that the graceful
woman riding between the two men was Sylvia. Why had she chosen an
outing with the ridiculous Blodgett? Sinclair, no man possessed sufficient
charm to offset the disadvantages of such a companionship.
George, when he was sure, reined in, surprised at his reflections. Blodgett,
heaven knew, had been good to him, and he had once liked the man. Why,
then, had he turned so viciously against him? Adjectives his mind had
recently applied to Blodgett flashed back: "Coarse," "fat," "ridiculous." Was
it just? Why did he do it in spite of himself?
Sinclair turned and saw him. The party reined in, Sylvia, as one would have
expected, impatiently in advance of the others. Her nod and something she

said were lost in the men's cheery greetings. Since she was in advance, and
edging on, as if to get farther away from him, George's opportunity was
plain. The road wasn't wide enough for four abreast. If he could move
forward with her Blodgett and Sinclair would have to ride together.
"Since I'm the last," he interrupted them, "mayn't I have first place?"
Quite as a matter of course he put his horse through and reined in at her
side. They started forward.
"You ride as well as ever," he commented.
She shot a glance at him. Calmly he studied the striking details of her face.
Each time he saw her she seemed more desirable. How was he to touch
those lips that had filled his boy's heart with bursting thoughts? For the first
time since that day they rode together, only now he was at her side, instead
of heeling like a trained dog. In his man's fashion he was as well clothed as
she. When they got back he would enter the great house with her instead of
going to the stables. Whether she cared to acknowledge it or not he was of
her kind—more so than the millionaire Blodgett ever could be. So he
absorbed her beauty which fired his imagination. Such a repetition seemed
ominous of a second climax in their relations.
Her quick glance, however, disclosed only resentment for his intrusion. He
excused it.
"You see, I couldn't very well ride behind you."
She turned away.
"Hurry a little," Blodgett called.
It was what George wished, as she wished to crawl, never far in advance of
the others.
"Come," he said, and flecked her horse with his crop.
"Don't do that again!"
He had gathered his own horse, and was galloping. Hers insisted on
following. When George pulled in to keep at her side they were well in

advance of the others. Now that he was alone with her he found it difficult
to speak, and evidently she would limit his opportunity, for as he drew in
she spurred her horse. He caught her, laughing.
"You may as well understand that I'll never ride behind you again."
She pressed her provocative lips together. So in silence, except for the
crunching and scattering of the snow, they tore on through the dusk,
rounding curves between hedges, rising to heights above bare, white
stretches of landscape, dipping into hollows already won by the night. And
each moment they came nearer the house.
In the night of the hollows he battled his desire to reach over and touch her,
and cry out:
"Sylvia! You've got to understand!"
And in one such place her horse stumbled, and she pulled in and bent low
over her saddle, and said, as if he had really spoken:
"I can't understand——"
Her outline was blurred, but her face was like a light in that shadowed
valley. He didn't speak until they were up the hill and the wind had caught
them.
"What?" he asked then.
Was it the glow, offered by the white earth rather than the sky, that made
him fancy her lips quivered?
"Why you always try to hurt me."
He thought of her broken riding crop, of her attempts to hurt him every time
he had seen her since the day she had tried to cut him with it. A single
exception clung to his memory—the night of Betty's dance, years ago, when
she had failed to remember him. Her words, therefore, carried a thrill, a
colour of surrender, since from the very first she had made him attack for
his own defence.
"That's an odd thing for you to say."

There were lights ahead, accents in the closing night for Blodgett's huge and
ugly extravagance. They rode slowly up the drive.
"Will you ever stop following me? Will you ever leave me alone?"
He stared at her, answering softly:
"It is impossible I should ever leave you alone."
At the terrace he sprang down, tossed his reins to a groom, and went to her,
raising his hands. For a moment she looked at him, hesitating. There were
two grooms. So she took his hands and leapt down. It was a quick,
uncertain touch her fingers gave him.
"Thanks," she said, and crossed the terrace at his side.
That moment, he reflected, was in itself culminating, yet he couldn't dismiss
the feeling that their relations approached a larger climax. All the better,
since things couldn't very well go on as they were. Was it that fleeting
contact that had altered him, or her companionship in the gray night? He
only knew as he walked close to her that the bitterness in his heart had
diminished. He was willing to relinquish the return blow if she would ease
the hurt she had given him. He told himself that she had never been nearer.
An odd fancy!
The others rode up as they reached the door, and the hall was noisy with
people just returned from the pond, so that their solitude was destroyed.
While he bathed and dressed he tried to understand just what had happened.
The alteration in his own heart could only be accounted for by a change in
hers. Perhaps his mood was determined by her unexpected wonder that he
should always try to hurt. He couldn't drive from his mind the definite
impression of her having come nearer.
"Winter sentiment!" he sneered, and hurried, for it was late.

VII

Lambert dropped in and lounged in a satin-covered chair while George
wrestled with his tie. He gave Lambert the freshest news from the office,
but his mind wasn't on business, nor, he guessed, was Lambert's.

"Blodgett does one rather well," Lambert said, glancing around the room.
George agreed.
"Only a marquise might feel more at ease in this room than a mere male."
He turned, smiling.
"I'm always afraid the furniture won't hold. Why should he have raised such
a monster?"
"Maybe," Lambert offered, "to have it ready for a wife."
"Who would marry him?" George flashed.
"Nearly any girl," Lambert said. "So much money irons out a lot of fat.
Then, when all's said and done, he's amusing and generous. He always tries
to please. Why? What's made you scornful of Josiah?"
"There are some things," George said, "that one oughtn't to be able to buy
with money."
Lambert arose, walked over to George, put his hands on his shoulders, and
stared at him quizzically.
"You're a curious brute."
"I know what you mean," George said, "but let me remind you that money
was just one of three things I started for."
Lambert's grasp tightened.
"And in a way you've got them all."
George shook off Lambert's grasp.
In a way!
"Let's go down."
In a way! It was rather cooling. It reminded him, too, that Squibs Bailly
remained unpaid; and there was Sylvia, only a trifle nearer, and that,
perhaps, in an eager imagination. Certainly he had forced some success, but

would he actually ever complete anything? Would he ever be able to say I
have acquired an exterior exactly as genuine as that one inherits, or I am a
great millionaire, or I have proved myself worthy of all Squibs has given
me, or I am Sylvia Planter's husband? Of course he had succeeded, but only
in a way. Where was his will that he couldn't conquer altogether?
As he came down the stairs he saw Sylvia in a dazzling gown standing in
front of the great fireplace surrounded by a group which included
Dalrymple and Rogers who had managed an invitation and had just arrived
with Wandel. Wandel brought excuses from Goodhue. It was like Goodhue,
George thought, to avoid such a party.
Dalrymple smirked and chatted. George left Lambert and went straight to
them. Sylvia could always be depended upon to be gracious to Dalrymple.
She glanced at George and nodded. Although she continued to talk to
Dalrymple she didn't turn away. George thought, indeed, that he detected a
slight movement as if to make room for him. It was as if he had been any
man of her acquaintance coming up. Then he had been right?
"Josiah said we'd have you," Dalrymple drawled. "Why didn't you skate?
Anything to get on a horse, what? Freezing pleasure this weather."
George smiled at Sylvia.
"Not with the right horse and companionship."
Any one could see that Dalrymple had already swallowed an antidote for
whatever benefit the day's fresh air and exercise had given him. Still in the
weak face, across which the firelight played, George read other traits,
settled, in a sense admirable; more precious than any inheritance a son
could expect from a washerwoman mother and a labouring father. Then
what was it Dalrymple had always coveted? What had made him rude to the
poor men at Princeton? Something he hadn't had. Money. America, George
reflected, could breed people like that. There was more than one way of
being a snob. He wondered if Dalrymple would ever submerge his pride
enough to come to him for money. He might go to Blodgett first, but
George wasn't at all sure Blodgett would find it worth his while to buy up
the young man.

Blodgett just then joined them. The white waistcoat encircling his rotund
middle was like an advance agent, crying aloud: "The great Josiah is
arriving just behind me."
"Everybody having a good time?" he bellowed.
Mrs. Sinclair, sitting near by, looked up, but her husband smiled
indulgently. George watched Sylvia. Blodgett put the question to her.
"That was a fine ride, wasn't it? I'm always a little afraid for the horse I ride,
though; might bend him in the middle."
George couldn't understand why she gave that friendly smile he coveted to
Blodgett.
"I'd give a lot to ride like this young man," Blodgett went on, patting
George's back. He preened himself. "Still we can't all be born in the
saddle."
The thing was so obvious George laughed outright. Even Sylvia conceded
its ugly, unintentional humour. A smile drew at the corners of her mouth. If
she could enjoy that she was, indeed, for the moment nearer.
Two servants glided around with trays.
Blodgett gulped the contents of his glass and smacked his lips.
"That fellow of mine," he boasted, "has his own blend. Not bad."
Sylvia drank hers with Dalrymple, while Betty over there shook her head.
Probably it was his ungraceful inheritance that made George dislike a glass
in Sylvia's fingers. Dalrymple slipped away.
"Dividends in the smoking-room!" Blodgett roared.
"Dalrymple's drawing dividends," George thought.
The procession for the dining-room formed and disbanded. Blodgett had
Mrs. Sinclair and Sylvia at either hand. It was natural enough, but George
resented the arrangement, particularly with Dalrymple next to Sylvia on the
other side. Betty sat between Dalrymple and Lambert. George was nearly
opposite, flanked by fluffy clothes and hair; and straightway each ear was

choked with fluffy chatter—the theatre; the opera, from the side of sartorial
criticism; the east coast of Florida—"but why should I go so far to see
exciting bathing suits out of season and tea tables wabbling under palm
trees?"—a scandal or two—that is such details as were permissible in his
presence. He divided his ears sufficiently to catch snatches from
neighbouring sections of the table.
"Of course, we'll keep out of it."
It was Wandel, speaking encouragingly to a pretty girl. Out of what?
Confound this chatter! Oh! The war, of course. It was the one remark of
serious import that reached him throughout the dinner, and the country
faced that possibility, and an increasing unrest of labour, and grave financial
questions. The diners might have been people who had fled to a high
mountain to escape an invasion, or happy ones who lived on a peak from
which the menace was invisible. But it wasn't that. At other social levels, he
knew, there was the same closing of the shutters, the same effort to create
an enjoyable sunlight in a cloistered room. On the summit, he honestly
believed, men did more and thought more. Perhaps where sensible men
gathered together the curtains weren't drawn against grave fires in an
abnormal night. Then it was the women. Did all men, like Wandel, choose
to keep such things from the women? Did the women want them kept?
Hang it! Then let them have the vote. Make them talk.
"You're really not going to Palm Beach, Mr. Morton?"
"I've too much to do."
"Men amuse me," the young lady fluffed. "They always talk about things to
do. If one has a good time the things get done just the same."
God! What a point of view! Yet he wasn't one to pass judgment since he
was more interested in the winning of Sylvia than he was in the winning of
the war.
He watched her as he could, talking first to Blodgett then to Dalrymple. The
brilliant Sylvia Planter had no business sitting between two such men. The
fact that Blodgett had got the right people stared him in the face, but even
so the man wasn't good enough to be Sylvia Planter's host. Nor did George
like the way she sipped her wine. She seemed forcing herself to a travesty

of enjoyment. Betty, on the other hand, drank nothing. He questioned if she
was sorry Sylvia had brought her. She seemed glad enough, at least, to be
with Lambert. He appeared to absorb her, and, in order to listen to him, she
left Dalrymple nearly wholly to Sylvia. Once or twice she glanced across
and smiled at George, but her kindliness had an air of coming from a
widening distance. George was trapped—a restless giant tangled in a snarl
of fluff.
He sighed his relief when the women had gone. He didn't remain long
behind, wandering into the deserted hall where he stood frowning at the
fire. He heard a reluctant step on the stairs and swung around. Sylvia
walked slowly down, a cloak about her shoulders. In a sort of desperation
he raised his hand.
"This party has got on my nerves."
He couldn't read the expression in her eyes.
"It's stifling in here," she said.
She walked the length of the hall, opened the door, and went through to the
terrace.
George's heart quickened. She was out there alone. What had her eyes
meant? He had never seen them just like that. They had seemed without
challenge.
There was a coat closet at the rear of the hall. He ran to it, got a cap and
somebody's overcoat, and followed her out.
She sat on the railing, far from the house. The only light upon her was the
nebulous reflection from the white earth. He hurried to her, his heart beating
to the rhythm of nearer—nearer—nearer——
She stirred.
"As usual with you," she said, "I am unfortunate. I didn't think you would
follow me. I came here because I wanted to be alone. I wanted to think. Can
you appreciate that?"
He sat on the railing close to her.

"You never want me. I have to grasp what opportunities I can."
He waited for her to rise and wander away. He was prepared to urge her to
remain. She didn't move.
"I can't always be running away from you," she said.
She stared straight ahead over the garden, nearly phosphorescent with its
snow.
"Nearer, nearer, nearer," went through his head.
"It has been a long time since I've seen you," he said, "but even so I wish
you hadn't come here."
"Why did you come?" she asked.
"Because I thought I should find you."
"Why did you think that?"
"I'd heard Blodgett had been a good deal at Oakmont. I guessed if Lambert
came you would, too."
"It is impertinent you should interest yourself in my movements. Why—
why do you do it?"
"Because everything you do absorbs me. Why else do you suppose I took
the trouble at Betty's dance years ago to tell you who I was?"
She drew back without answering. Her movement caught his attention. The
change in her manner, the white night, made him bold.
"I've often wondered," he said, "why you didn't remember me that day in
Princeton, or that night. It hadn't been long. Don't you see it was an
acknowledgment that I wasn't the old George Morton even then?"
"Oh, no," she answered with a little laugh, "because I remembered you
perfectly well."
"Remembered me!" he cried. "And you danced with me, and said you didn't
remember, and let me take you aside, and——"

He moved swiftly nearer until his face was close to hers, until he stared into
her eyes that he could barely see.
"Why did you do that?"
She didn't answer.
"Why do you tell me now?" he urged with an increasing excitement.
Such a confession from her had the quality of a caress! He felt himself
reaching up to touch the summit.
"Why? You've got to answer me."
She arose with easy grace and stood looking down at him.
"Because," she said, "I want you to stop being ridiculous and troublesome;
and, really, the whole thing seems so unimportant now that I am going to be
married."
He cried out. He sprang to his feet. He caught her hands, and crushed them
as if he would make them a part of his own flesh so that she could never
escape to accomplish that unbearable act.
"Sylvia! Sylvia!"
She fought, gasping:
"You hurt! I tell you you hurt! Let me go you—you——Let me go——"

VIII

George stared at Sylvia as if she had been a child expressing some
unreasonable and incredible intention. "What are you talking about? How
can I let you go?"
Even in that light he became aware of the distortion of her face, of an
unexpected moisture in her eyes; and he realized quite distinctly where he
was, what had been said, just how completely her announcement for the
moment had swept his mind clean of the restraints with which he had so
painstakingly crowded it. Now he appreciated the power of his grasp, but he

watched a little longer the struggles of her graceful body; for, after all, he
had been right. How could he let her go to some man whose arms would
furnish an inviolable sanctuary? He shook his head. No such thing existed.
Hadn't he, indeed, foreseen exactly this situation, and hadn't he told himself
it couldn't close the approach to his pursuit? But he had never reconnoitred
that road. Now he must find it no matter how forbidding the places it might
thread. So he released her. She raised her hands to her face.
"You hurt!" she whispered. "Oh, how you hurt!"
"Please tell me who it is."
She turned, and, her hands still raised, started across the terrace. He
followed.
"Tell me!"
She went on without answering. He watched her go, suppressing his angry
instinct to grasp her again that he might force the name from her. He
shrugged his shoulders. Since she had probably timed her attack on him
with a general announcement, he would know soon enough. He could fancy
those in the house already buzzing excitedly.
"I always said she'd marry so and so;" or, "She might have done better—or
worse;" perhaps an acrid, "It's high time, I should think"—all the banal
remarks people make at such crises. But what lingered in George's brain
was his own determination.
"She shan't do it. Somehow I'll stop her."
He glanced over the garden, dully surprised that it should retain its former
aspect while his own outlook had altered as chaotically as it had done that
day long ago when he had blundered into telling her he loved her.
He turned and approached the house to seek this knowledge absolutely vital
to him but from which, nevertheless, he shrank. Two names slipped into his
mind, two disagreeable figures of men she had recently chosen to be a good
deal with.
George acknowledged freely enough now that he had taken his later view of
his employer from an altitude of jealousy. Blodgett offered a possibility in

some ways quite logical. With war finance he worked closer and closer to
Old Planter. He had become a familiar figure at Oakmont. George had seen
Sylvia choose his companionship that afternoon, had watched her a little
while ago make him happy with her smiles; yet if she could tolerate
Blodgett why had she never forgiven George his beginnings?
Dalrymple was a more likely and infinitely less palatable choice. He was
good-looking, entirely of her kind, had been, after a fashion, raised at her
side; and Sylvia's wealth would be agreeable to the Dalrymple bank
account. George had had sufficient evidence that he wanted her—and her
money. A large portion of the enmity between them, in fact, could be traced
to the day he had found her portrait displayed on Dalrymple's desk. The
only argument against Dalrymple was his weakness, and people smiled at
that indulgently, ascribing it to youth—even Sylvia who couldn't possibly
know how far it went.
Suspense was intolerable. He walked into the house and replaced the coat
and cap in the closet. He commenced to look for Sylvia. No matter whose
toes it affected he was going to have another talk with her if either of his
hazards touched fact.

IX

He caught the rising and falling of a perpetual mixed conversation only
partially smothered by a reckless assault on a piano. He traced the racket to
the large drawing-room where groups had gathered in the corners as if in a
hopeless attempt to escape the concert. Sylvia sat with none. One of the
fluffy young ladies was proving the strength of the piano. Rogers was
amorously attentive to her music. Lambert and Betty sat as far as possible
from everyone else, heads rather close. Blodgett hopped heavily from group
to group.
Over the frantic attempts of the young performer the human voice
triumphed, but the impulse to this conversation was multiple. From no
group did Sylvia's name slip, and George experienced a sharp wonder; so
far, evidently, she had chosen to tell only him.

The young lady at the piano crashed to a brief vacation. The chatter,
following a perfunctory applause, rose gratefully.
"Fine! Fine!" Blodgett roared. "Your next stop ought to be Carnegie Hall."
"She ought to play in a hall," someone murmured unkindly.
George retreated, relieved that Blodgett wasn't with Sylvia; and a little later
he found Dalrymple in the smoking-room sipping whiskey-and-soda
between erratic shots at billiards. Wandel was at the table most of the time,
counting long strings with easy precision.
"What's up, great man?" he wanted to know.
Dalrymple, too, glanced curiously at George over his glass. "Nothing
exceptional that I know of," George snapped and left the room.
It added to his anger that his mind should let through its discontent. At least
Sylvia wasn't with Blodgett or Dalrymple, and he tried to tell himself his
jealousy was too hasty. All the eligible men weren't gathered in this house.
He wandered from room to room, always seeking Sylvia. Where could she
have gone?
He met guests fleeing from drawing-room to library, as if driven by the
tangled furies of a Hungarian dance.
"Will that girl never stop playing?" he thought.
Betty came up to him.
"Talk to me, George."
He found himself reluctant, but two tables of bridge were forming, and
Betty didn't care to play. Lambert did, and sat down. George followed Betty
to a window seat, telling himself she wanted him only because Lambert was
for the time, lost to her.
"Now," she said, directly, "what is it, George?"
"What's what?" he asked with an attempt at good-humour.

Her question had made him uneasy, since it suggested that she had observed
the trouble he was endeavouring to bury. Would he never learn to repress as
Goodhue did? But even Goodhue, he recalled, had failed to hide an acute
suffering at a football game; and this game was infinitely bigger, and the
point he had just lost vastly more important than a fumbled ball.
"You've changed," Betty was saying. "I'm a good judge, because I haven't
really seen you for nearly a year. You've seemed—I scarcely know how to
say it—unhappy?"
"Why not tired?" he suggested, listlessly. "You may not know it, but I've
been pretty hard at work."
She nodded quickly.
"I've heard a good deal from Lambert what you are doing, and something
from Squibs and Mrs. Squibs. You haven't seen much of them, either. Do
you mind if I say I think it makes them uneasy?"
"Scold. I deserve it," he said. "But I've written."
"I don't mean to scold," she smiled. "I only want to find out what makes
you discontented, maybe ask if it's worth while wearing yourself out to get
rich."
"I don't know," he answered. "I think so."
It was his first doubt. He looked at her moodily.
"You're not one to draw the long bow, Betty. Honestly, aren't you a little
cross with me on account of the Baillys?"
"Not even on my own account."
Her allusion was clear enough. George was glad Blodgett created a
diversion just then, lumbering in and bellowing to Lambert for news of his
sister. George listened breathlessly.
"Haven't seen her," Lambert said, and doubled a bid.
"Miss Alston?" Blodgett applied to Betty.

"Where should she be?" Betty answered.
"Got me puzzled," Blodgett muttered. "Responsibility. If anything
happened!"
Betty laughed.
"What could happen to her here?"
George guessed then where Sylvia had gone, and he experienced a strong
but temporal exaltation. Only a mental or a bodily hurt could have driven
Sylvia to her room. He didn't believe in the first, but he could still feel the
shape of her slender fingers crushed against his. The greater her pain, the
greater her knowledge of his determination and desire.
"Guess I'll send Mrs. Sinclair upstairs," Blodgett said, gropingly.
He hurried out of the room. Betty rose.
"I suppose I ought to go."
"Nonsense," George objected. "She isn't the sort to come down ill all at
once."
He followed Betty to the hall, however. Mrs. Sinclair was halfway up the
stairs. Blodgett had gone on, always pandering, George reflected, to his
guests.
"I'll wait here," Betty said to Mrs. Sinclair. "I mean, if anything should be
wrong, if Sylvia should want me."
Mrs. Sinclair nodded, disappearing in the upper hall.
Finally George faced the moment he had avoided with a persistent longing.
For the first time since the night of his confession he was quite alone with
Betty. He tried not to picture her swaying away from him in a moonlight
scented with flowers; but he couldn't help hearing her frightened voice:
"Don't say anything more now," and he experienced again her hand's
delightful and bewitching fragility. Why had his confession startled? What
had it portended for her?

He sighed. There was no point asking such questions, no reason for
avoiding such dangerous moments now; too many factors had assumed new
shapes. The long separation had certainly not been without its effect on
Betty, and hadn't he recently seen her absorbed by Lambert? Hadn't she just
now scolded him with a clear appreciation of his shortcomings? In the old
days she had unconsciously offered him a pleasurable temptation, and he
had been afraid of yielding to it because of its effect on his aim. Sylvia just
now had tried to convince him that his aim was permanently turned aside.
He knew with a hard strength of will that it wasn't. Nothing could tempt
him from his path now—even Betty's kindness.
"Betty—have you heard anything of her getting married?"
She glanced at him, surprised.
"Who? Sylvia?"
He nodded.
"Only," she answered, "the rumours one always hears about a very popular
girl. Why, George?"
"The rumours make one wonder. Nothing comes of them," he said, sorry he
had spoken, seeking a safe withdrawal. "You know there's principally one
about you. It persists."
There was a curious light in her eyes, reminiscent of something he had seen
there the night of his confession.
"You've just remarked," she laughed, softly, "that rumours seldom
materialize."
What did she mean by that? Before he could go after an answer Mrs.
Sinclair came down, joined them, and explained that Sylvia was tired and
didn't want any one bothered. George's exaltation increased. He hoped he
had hurt her, as he had always wanted to. Blodgett, accompanied by Wandel
and Dalrymple, wandered from the smoking-room, seeking news. George
felt every muscle tighten, for Blodgett, at sight of Mrs. Sinclair, roared:
"Where is Sylvia?"

The gross familiarity held him momentarily convinced, then he
remembered that Blodgett was eager to make progress with such people,
quick to snatch at every advantage. Sylvia wasn't here to rebuke him. Under
the circumstances, the others couldn't very well. As a matter of fact, they
appeared to notice nothing. Of course it wasn't Blodgett.
"In her room with a headache," Mrs. Sinclair answered. "She may come
down later."
"Headaches," Wandel said, "cover a multitude of whims."
George didn't like his tone. Wandel always gave you the impression of a
vision subtle and disconcerting.
Dalrymple, in spite of his confused state, was caught rattling off questions
at Mrs. Sinclair, too full of concern, while George watched him, wondering
—wondering.
"Must have her own way," Blodgett interrupted. "Bridge! Let's cut in or
make another table. George?"
George and Betty shook their heads, so Blodgett, with that air of a
showman leading his spectators to some fresh surprise, hurried the others
away. George didn't attempt to hide his distaste. He stared at the fire. Hang
Blodgett and his familiarities!
"What are you thinking about, George?"
"Would you have come here, Betty, of your own wish?"
"Why not?"
"Blodgett."
"What about the old dear?"
George started, turned, and looked full at her. There was no question. She
meant it, and earlier in the evening Lambert had said nearly any girl would
marry Blodgett. What had become of his own judgment? He felt the
necessity of defending it.

"He's too precious happy to have people like you in his house. You know
perfectly well he hasn't always been able to do it."
"Isn't that why everyone likes him," she asked, "because he's so completely
unaffected?"
George understood he was on thin ice. He didn't deviate.
"You mean he's all the more admirable because he hasn't plastered himself
with veneer?"
Her white cheeks flushed. She was as nearly angry as he had ever seen her.
"I thought you'd never go back to that," she said. "Didn't I make it clear any
mention of it in the first place was quite unnecessary?"
"I thought you had a reproof for me, Betty. You don't suppose I ever forget
what I've had to do, what I still have to accomplish."
She half stretched out her hand.
"Why do you try to quarrel with me, George?"
"I wouldn't for the world," he denied, warmly.
"But you do. I told you once you were different. You shouldn't compare
yourself with Mr. Blodgett or any one. What you set out for you always
get."
He smiled a little. She was right, and he must never lose his sense of will,
his confidence of success.
She started to speak, then hesitated. She wouldn't meet his glance.
"Why," she asked, "did you tell me that night?"
"Because," he answered, uncomfortably, "you were too good a friend to
impose upon. I had to give you an opportunity to drive me away."
"I didn't take it," she said, quickly, "yet you went as thoroughly as if I had."
She spread her hands.

"You make me feel as if I'd done something awkward to you. It isn't fair."
Smiling wistfully, he touched her hand.
"Don't talk that way. Don't let us ever quarrel, Betty. You've never meant
anything but kindness to me. I'd like to feel there's always a little kindness
for me in your heart."
Her long lashes lowered slowly over her eyes.
"There is. There always will be, George."

X

For some time after Betty had left him George remained staring at the fire.
The chatter and the intermittent banging of the piano made him long for
quiet; but it was good discipline to stay downstairs, and Mrs. Sinclair had
said Sylvia might show herself later. So he waited, struggling with his old
doubt, asking himself if he had actually acquired anything genuine except
his money.
Later he wandered again from room to room, seeking Sylvia, but she didn't
appear, and he couldn't understand her failure. Had it any meaning for him?
Why, for that matter, should she strike him before any other knew of the
weapon in her hand? From time to time Dalrymple expressed a maudlin
concern for her, and George's uncertainty increased. If it should turn out to
be Dalrymple, he told himself hotly, he would be capable of killing.
The young man quite fulfilled his promise of the early evening. Long after
the last of the women had retired he remained in the smoking-room. Rogers
abetted him, glad, doubtless, to be sportive in such distinguished company.
Wandel loitered, too, and was unusually flushed, refilling his glass rather
often. Lambert, Blodgett, and he were at a final game of billiards.
"You've been with Dalrymple all evening," George said, significantly, to
Wandel.
"My dear George," Wandel answered, easily, "I observe the habits of my
fellow creatures. Be they good or bad I venture not to interfere."

"An easy creed," George said. "You're not your brother's keeper."
"Rather not. The man that keeps himself makes the world better."
George had a disturbing fancy that Wandel accused him.
"You don't mean that at all," he said. "When will you learn to say what you
mean?"
"Perhaps," Wandel replied, sipping, "when I decide not to enter politics."
"Your shot," Blodgett called, and Wandel strolled to the table.
Dalrymple didn't play, his accuracy having diminished to the point of
laughter. He edged across to George.
"Old George Morton!" he drawled. "Young George Croesus! And all that."
The slurred last phrase was as abhorrent as "why don't you stick to your
laundry?" It carried much the same implication. But Dalrymple was up to
something, wanted something. He came to it after a time with the air of one
conferring a regal favour.
"Haven't got a hundred in your pocket, Croesus? Driggs and bridge have
squeezed me dry. Blodgett's got bones. Never saw such a man. Has
everything. Driggs is running out. Recoup at bones. Everybody shoot. Got
the change, save me running upstairs? Bad for my heart, and all that."
He grinned. George grinned back. It was a small favour, but it was a start,
for the other acquired bad habits readily. Ammunition against Dalrymple!
He had always needed it, might want it more than ever now. At last
Dalrymple himself put it in his hand.
He passed over the money, observing that the other moved so as to screen
the transaction from those about the table.
"Little night-cap with me?" Dalrymple suggested as if by way of payment.
George laughed.
"Haven't you already protected the heads of the party?"

Dalrymple made a wry face.
"Do their heads a lot more good than mine."
The game ended.
Dalrymple turned away shouting.
"Bones! Bones!"
Blodgett produced a pair of dice with his air of giving each of his patrons
his heart's desire. Wandel yawned. Dalrymple rattled the dice and slithered
them across the billiard table.
"Coming in, George?" Blodgett roared.
"Thanks. I'm off to bed."
But he waited, curious as to the destination of the small loan he had just
made.
Blodgett with tact threw for reasonable stakes. Roger's play was necessarily
small, and he seemed ashamed of the fact. Lambert put plenty on the table,
but urged no takers. Wandel varied his wagers. Dalrymple covered
everything he could, and had luck.
George studied the intent figures, the eager eyes, as the dice flopped across
the table; listened to the polished voices raised to these toys in childish
supplications that sang with the petulant accents of negroes. Simultaneously
he was irritated and entertained, experiencing a vague, uneasy fear that a
requisite side of life, of which this folly might be taken as a symbol, had
altogether escaped him. He laughed aloud when Wandel sang something
about seven and eleven. His voice resembled a negro's as the peep of a
sparrow approaches an eagle's scream.
"What you laughing at, great man? One must talk to them. Otherwise they
don't behave, and you see I rolled an eleven. Positive proof."
He gathered in the money he had won.
"Shooting fifty this time."

"Why not shoot?" Dalrymple asked George. "'Fraid you couldn't talk to
'em?"
"Thing doesn't interest me."
"No sport, George Morton."
It was the way it was said that arrested George. Trust Dalrymple when he
had had enough to drink to air his dislikes. The others glanced up.
"How much have you got there?" George asked quietly.
With a slightly startled air Dalrymple ran over his money.
"Pretty nearly three. Why?"
"Call it three," George said.
He gathered the dice from the table. The others drew back, leaving, as it
were, the ring clear.
"I'll throw you just once," George said, "for three hundred. High man to
throw. On?"
"Sure," Dalrymple said, thickly.
George counted out his money and placed it on the table. He threw a five.
Dalrymple couldn't do better than a four. George rattled the dice, and, rather
craving some of the other's Senegambian chatter, rolled them. They rested
six and four. Dalrymple didn't try to hide his delight.
"Stung, old George Morton! Never come a ten again."
"There'll come another ten," George promised.
He continued to roll, a trifle self-conscious in his silence, while Dalrymple
bent over the table, desirous of a seven, while the others watched, absorbed.
Sixes and eights fell, and other numbers, but for half-a-dozen throws no
seven or ten.
"Come you seven!" Dalrymple sang.

"You've luck, George," Lambert commented. "I wouldn't lay against you
now. I'll go you fifty, Driggs, on his ten."
"Done!"
The next throw the dice turned up six and four.
"The very greatest of men," Wandel said, ruefully.
While George put the money in his pocket Dalrymple straightened,
frowning.
"Double or quits! Revenge!"
"I said once," George reminded him. "I'm off to bed."
The others resumed their play. Dalrymple stared at George, an ugly light in
his eyes. George nodded, and the other followed him to the door. George
handed him a hundred dollars.
"Save you running upstairs. How much do you owe me now?"
"Couple hundred."
"I shouldn't worry about that," George laughed. "When you want a good
deal more and it's inconvenient to run upstairs I might save you some
trouble."
"Now that's white of you," Dalrymple condescended, and went, a trifle
unsteadily, back to the table.
George carried to his room an impression that he had thoroughly soiled his
hands at last, but unavoidably. Of course he had scorned Blodgett for
involving Sinclair. His own case was very different. Besides, he hadn't
actually involved Dalrymple yet, but he had made a start. Dalrymple had
always gunned for him. More than ever since Sylvia's announcement,
George felt the necessity of getting Dalrymple where he could handle him.
If she had chosen Dalrymple, of course, money would serve only until the
greedy youth could get his fingers in the Planter bags. He shook with a
quick repugnance. No matter who won her it mustn't be Dalrymple. He
would stop that at any cost.

He sat for some time on the edge of the bed, studying the pattern of the rug.
Was Dalrymple the man to arouse a grand passion in her? She had said:
"I can't always be running away from you."
She had told him and no one else. Was the thing calculation, quite bereft of
love? Oh, no. George couldn't imagine he was of such importance she
would flee that far to be rid of him; but he went to bed at last, confessing
the situation had elements he couldn't grasp. Perhaps, when he knew surely
who the man was, they would become sufficiently ponderable.

XI

He was up early after a miserable night, and failed to rout his depression
with a long ride over country roads. When he got back in search of
breakfast he found the others straggling down. First of all he saw
Dalrymple, white and unsteady; heard him asking for Sylvia. Sylvia hadn't
appeared.
"Who's for church?" Blodgett roared.
Mrs. Sinclair offered to shepherd the devout. They weren't many. Men even
called Blodgett names for this newest recreation he had appeared to offer.
"How late did you play?" George asked Blodgett.
"Until, when I looked at my watch, I thought it must be last evening. These
young bloods are too keen for Papa Blodgett."
"Get into you?" George laughed.
"I usually manage to hang on to my money," Blodgett bragged, "but the
stakes ran bigger and bigger. I'll say one thing for young Dalrymple. He's
no piker. Wrote I. O. U's until he wore out his fountain pen. I could paper a
room with what I got. I'd be ashamed to collect them."
"Why?" George asked, shortly. "When he wrote them he knew they had to
be redeemed."
Blodgett grinned.
"I expect he was a little pickled. Probably's forgot he signed them. I won't
make him unhappy with his little pieces of paper."
"Daresay he'll be grateful," George said, dryly.
His ride had brought no appetite. After breakfast he avoided people with a
conviction that his only business here was to see Sylvia again, then to
escape. It was noon before she appeared with Betty. He caught them
walking from the hall to the library, and he studied Sylvia's face with
anxious curiosity. It disappointed, repelled him. It was quite unchanged, as

full of colour as usual, as full of unfriendliness. She nodded carelessly, quite
as if nothing had happened—gave him the identical, remote greeting to
which he had become too accustomed. And last evening he had fancied her
nearer! He noticed, however, that she had put her hands behind her back.
"I hope you're feeling better."
"Better! I haven't been ill," she flashed.
Betty helped him out.
"Last night Mrs. Sinclair told us you had a headache."
"You ought to know, Betty, that means I was tired."
But George noticed she no longer looked at him. She hurried on.
"Dolly!" he heard her laugh. "You must have sat up rather late."
"Trying to forget my worry about you, Sylvia. Guess it gave me your
headache."
George shrugged his shoulders and edged away, measuring his chances of
seeing her alone. They were slender, for as usual she was a magnet, yet luck
played for him and against her after luncheon, bringing them at the same
moment from different directions to the empty hall. She wanted to hurry by,
as if he were a disturbing shadow, but he barred her way.
"I suppose I should say I'm sorry I hurt you last night. I'll say it, if you wish,
but I'm not particularly sorry."
She showed him her hands then, spread them before him. They trembled,
but that was all. They recorded no marks of his precipitancy.
"I shouldn't expect you to be sorry. After that certainly you will never speak
to me again."
"Will you tell me now who it is?" he asked.
Her temper blazed.
"I ought always to know what to expect from you."

She ran back to the door through which she had entered.
"Oh, Dolly!"
Dalrymple met her on the threshold.
"Take me for a walk," she said. "It won't hurt you."
Dalrymple indicated George.
"Morton coming?"
She shook her head and ran lightly upstairs.
"No, I'm not going," George said. "She's right. The fresh air will do you
good."
"Thanks," Dalrymple answered, petulantly. "I'm quite capable of
prescribing for myself."
He went out in search of his hat and coat.
George watched him, letting all his dislike escape. Continually they hovered
on the edge of a break, but Dalrymple wouldn't quite permit it now. George
was confident that the seed sown last night would flower.
He was glad when Mundy telephoned before dinner about some difficulties
of transportation that might have been solved the next day. George sprang at
the excuse, however, refused Blodgett's offer of a car to town, and drove to
the station.
Dalrymple and Sylvia hadn't returned.

XII

In town Goodhue, too, read his discontent.
"You look tired out, George," he said the next morning. "Evidently
Blodgett's party wasn't much benefit."
"I'm learning to dislike parties," George answered. "You were wise to duck
it. What was the matter? Didn't fancy the Blodgett brand of hospitality?"

"Promised my mother to spend the week-end at Westbury. I'd have enjoyed
it. I'm really growing fond of Blodgett."
There it was again, and you couldn't question Goodhue. Always he said just
what he meant, or he kept his opinions to himself. Every word of praise for
Blodgett reached George as a direct charge of disloyalty, of bad judgment,
of narrow-mindedness. His irritation increased. He was grateful for the
mass of work in which he was involved. That chained his imagination by
day, but at night he wearily reviewed the past five years, seeking his points
of weakness, some fatal omission.
Perhaps his chief fault had been too self-centred a pursuit of Sylvia.
Because of her he had repressed the instincts to which he saw other men
pandering as a matter of course. Dalrymple did, yet she preferred him,
perhaps to the point of making a gift of herself. He had avoided even those
more legitimate pleasures of which the dice had appealed to him as a type.
What was the use of it? Why had he done it? Yet even now, and still
because of her, when you came to that, he had no desire to turn aside to the
brighter places where plumed creatures flutter fatefully. It was a species of
tragedy that he had to keep himself for one who didn't want him.
It stared at him at breakfast from the page of a newspaper. It was amazing
that the journal saw nothing grotesque in such a union; found it, to the
contrary, sensible and beneficial, not only to the persons involved, but to the
entire country.
Planter, the article pointed out, was no longer capable of bringing a
resistless energy to his house which was a notable stone in the country's
financial structure. Should any chance weaken that the entire building
would react. His son was at present too young and inexperienced to watch
that stone, to keep it intact. Later, of course—but one had to consider the
present. To be sure there were partners, but after the fashion of great egoists
Mr. Planter had avoided admitting any outstanding personality to his firm. It
was a happy circumstance that Cupid, and so forth—for the senior partner
of Blodgett and Sinclair was more than an outstanding personality in Wall
Street. Some of his recent achievements were comparable with Mr. Planter's
earlier ones. The dissolution of his firm and his induction into the house of
Planter and Company were prophesied.

George continued to eat his breakfast mechanically. At least it wasn't
Dalrymple, yet that resolution would have been less astonishing. Josiah
Blodgett, fat, middle-aged, of no family, married to the beautiful and
brilliant Sylvia Planter! But was it grotesque? Wasn't the paper right? He
had had plenty of proof that his own judgment of Blodgett was worthless.
He crumpled the paper in his hand and stood up. His judgment was worth
this: he was willing to swear Sylvia Planter didn't love the man she had
elected to marry.
What did other people think?
Wandel was at hand. George stopped on his way out. The little man was
still in bed, sipping coffee while he, too, studied that disturbing page; yet,
when he had sent his man from the room, he didn't appear to find about it
anything extraordinary.
"Good business all round," he commented, "although I must admit I'm
surprised Sylvia had the common-sense to realize it. Impulsive sort, didn't
you think, George, who would fly to some fellow because she'd taken a
fancy to him? Phew! Planter plus Blodgett! It'll make her about the richest
girl in America, why not say the world? Some households are uneasy this
morning. Well! When you come down to it, what's the difference between
railroads and mills? Between mines and real estate? One's about as useful as
the others."
"It's revolting," George said.
Wandel glanced over his paper.
"What's up, great man? Nothing of the sort. Blodgett has his points."
"As usual, you don't mean what you say," George snapped.
"But I do, my dear George."
"Blodgett's not like the people he plays with."
"Isn't that a virtue?" Wandel asked. "Perhaps it's why those people like
him."
"But do they really?"

"You're purposely blind if you don't see it," Wandel answered. "Why the
deuce don't you?"
George feared he had let slip too much. With others he would have to guard
his interest closer, and he would delay the final break he had quite decided
upon with Blodgett.
"Just the same," he muttered, ill at ease, preparing to leave, "I'd like
Lambert's opinion."
"You don't fancy this has happened," Wandel said, "without Lambert's
knowing all about it?"
George left without answering. At least he knew. It was simpler,
consequently, to discipline himself. His manner disclosed nothing when he
made the necessary visit to Blodgett. The round face was radiant. The
narrow eyes burned with happiness.
"You're a cagy old Brummell," George said. "I've just seen it in the paper
with the rest of the world. When's it coming off?"
Blodgett's content faded a trifle.
"She says not for a long time yet, but we'll see. Trust Josiah to hurry things
all he can."
"Congratulations, anyway," George said. "You know you're entitled to
them."
But he couldn't offer his hand. With that he had an instinct to tear the
happiness from the other's face.
"You bet I am," Blodgett was roaring. "Any fool can see I'm pleased as
punch."
George couldn't stomach any more of it. He started out, but Blodgett, rather
hesitatingly, summoned him back. George obeyed, annoyed and curious.
"A good many years ago, George," Blodgett began, "I was a damned idiot. I
remember telling you that when Papa Blodgett got married it would be to
the right girl."

"The convenient girl," George sneered. "Don't you think you're doing it?"
"Now see here, George. None of that. You forget it. I'm sorry I ever thought
or said such stuff. You get it through your head just what this is—plain
adoration."
He sprang to his feet in an emotional outburst that made George writhe.
"I don't see why God has been so good to me."

XIII

George escaped and hurried upstairs. Lambert was there, but he didn't
mention the announcement, and George couldn't very well lead him. No one
who did talk of it in his presence, however, shared his bitter disapproval.
Most men dwelt as Wandel did on the material values of such a match,
which, far from diminishing Sylvia's brilliancy, would make it burn brighter
than ever.
Occasionally he saw Sylvia and Blodgett together. For him she had that air
of seeking an unreal pleasure, but she was always considerate of Blodgett,
who seemed perpetually on the point of clasping her publicly in his arms. A
recurrent contact was impossible for George. He went to Blodgett finally,
and over his spirited resistance broke the last tie.
"My remaining on your pay-roll," he complained, "is pure charity. I don't
want it. I won't have it. God knows I'm grateful for all you've done for me.
It's been a lot."
"Never forget you've done something for Blodgett," the stout man said,
warmly. "There's no question but you've earned every penny you've had
from me. We've played and worked together a long time, George. I don't see
just because you've grown up too fast why you've got to make Papa
Blodgett unhappy."
George had no answer, but he didn't have to see much of the beaming beau
after that, nor for a long time did he encounter Sylvia at all intimately.
Lambert, himself, unwittingly brought them together in the spring.

"Why not run down to Oakmont with me?" he said, casually, one Friday
morning. "Father's always asking why you're never around."
"Your father might be pleased to know why," George said.
"Dark ages!" Lambert said. "We're in the present now. Come ahead."
The invitation to enter the gates! But it brought to George none of the
glowing triumph he had anticipated. He knew why Lambert had offered it,
because he considered Sylvia removed from any possible unpleasant
aftermath of the dark ages. The man Morton didn't need any further
chastisement; but he went, because he knew what Lambert didn't, that the
man Morton wasn't through with Sylvia yet; that he was going to find out
why she had chosen Blodgett when, except on the score of money, she
might have beckoned better from nearly any direction; that he was curious
why she had told the man Morton first of all.
They rolled in at the gate. There he had stood, and there she, when she had
set her dog on him. Then around the curve to the great house and in at the
front door with an aging Simpson and a younger servant to compete for his
bag and his coat and hat. How Simpson scraped—Simpson who had
ordered him to go where he belonged, to the back door. What was the
matter with him that he couldn't experience the elation with which the
moment was crowded?
Mrs. Planter met him with her serene manner of one beyond human
frailties. You couldn't expect her to go back and remember. Such a return to
her would be beyond belief.
"You've not been kind to us, Mr. Morton. You've never been here before."
And that night she had walked through the doorway treating him exactly as
if he had been a piece of furniture which had annoyingly got itself out of
place.
Lambert's eyes were quizzical.
Old Planter wasn't at all the bear, cracking cumbersome jokes about the
young ferret that had stolen a march on the sly old foxes of Wall Street. So

that was what his threats amounted to! Or was it because there was nothing
whatever of the former George Morton left?
He examined curiously the bowed white head and the dim eyes in which
some fire lingered. He could still approximate the emotions aroused by that
interview in the library. He felt the old instinct to give this man every
concession to a vast superiority. In a sense, he was still afraid of him. He
had to get over that, for hadn't he come here to accomplish just that against
which Old Planter had warned him?
"Where," Lambert asked, "is the blushing Josiah?"
George caught the irony of his voice, but his mother explained in her
unemotional way that Sylvia and Blodgett were riding.
Certainly all along those early days had been in Lambert's mind, for he led
George to the scene of their fight. He faced him there, and he laughed.
"You remember?"
"Why not?" George said. "I was born that day."
"Morton! Morton!" Lambert mused.
George swung and caught Lambert's shoulders quickly. There was more
than sentiment in his quick, reminiscent outburst. It seemed even to himself
to carry another threat.
"You call me Mr. Morton, or just George, as if I were about as good as
you."
Lambert laughed.
"We've had some fair battles since then, haven't we, George? You've done a
lot you said you would that day."
"I've scarcely started," George answered. "I'm a dismal failure. Perhaps I'll
brace up."
"You're hard to satisfy," Lambert said.
George dug at the ground with his heel.

"All the greater necessity to find ultimate satisfaction," he grumbled.
Lambert glanced at him inquiringly.
"I suppose," George continued, "I ought to thank you and your sister for not
reminding your parents what I was some years ago, for not blurting it out to
a lot of other people."
"You've shown me," Lambert said, "it would have been vicious to have put
any stumbling blocks in your way. Driggs is right. He usually is. You're a
very great man."
But George shook his head, and accompanied Lambert back to the house
with the despondency of failure.
Sylvia and Blodgett were back, lounging with Mr. and Mrs. Planter about a
tea table which servants had carried to a sunny spot on the lawn. At sight of
George Sylvia's colour heightened. Momentarily she hesitated to take his
offered hand, then bowed to the presence of the others.
"You didn't tell me, Lambert, you were bringing any one."
Blodgett's welcome was cordial enough to strike a balance.
"Never see anything of you these days, George. He makes money, Mrs.
Planter, too fast to bother with an old plodder like me. Thank the Lord I've
still got cash in his firm."
That he should ever call that quiet, assured figure mother-in-law! Mrs.
Planter, however, showed no displeasure. She commenced to chat with
Lambert. Sylvia, George reflected, might with profit have borrowed some
of her mother's serenity. Still she managed to entertain him over the tea
cups as if he had been any casual, uninteresting guest.
That hour, nevertheless, furnished George an ugly ordeal, for Blodgett's
attentions were perpetual, and Sylvia appeared to appreciate them, treating
him with a consideration that let through at least that affection the man had
surprisingly drawn from so many of his acquaintances.
A secretary interrupted them, hurrying from the house with an abrupt
concern stamped on his face, standing by awkwardly as if not knowing how

to commence.
"What is it, Straker?" Mr. Planter asked.
"Mr. Brown's on the 'phone, sir. I think you'd better come. He said he didn't
want to bother you until he was quite sure. There seems no doubt now."
"Of what, Straker?" Mr. Planter asked. "Wouldn't it have kept through tea
time?"
The secretary seemed reluctant to speak. The women glanced at him
uneasily. Lambert started to rise. In spite of his preoccupation George had a
suspicion of the truth. All at once Blodgett half expressed it, bringing his
fist noisily down on the table.
"The Huns have torpedoed an American boat!"
Straker blurted out the truth.
"Oh, no, Mr. Blodgett. It's the Lusitania, but apparently the losses are
serious."
For a moment the silence was complete. Even the servants forgot their
errands and remained immobile, with gaping faces. An evil premonition
swept George. There were many Americans on the Lusitania. He knew a
number quite well. Undoubtedly some had gone down. Which of his
friends? One properly asked such questions only when one's country was at
war. The United States wasn't at war with Germany. Would they be now?
How was the sinking of the Lusitania going to effect him?
Old Planter, Blodgett, and Lambert were already on their feet, starting for
the door. Mrs. Planter rose, but unhurriedly, and went close to her husband's
side. In that movement George fancied he had caught at last something
warm and human. Probably she had weighed the gravity of this
announcement, and was determined to wheedle the old man from too much
excitement, from too great a temper, from too thorough a preoccupation
with the changes bound to reach Wall Street from this tragedy.
"I want to talk to Brown, too, if you please," Blodgett roared.

They crowded into the hall, all except Sylvia and George who had risen
last. He had measured his movements by hers. They entered the library
together while the others hurried through to Mr. Planter's study where the
telephone stood, anxious to speak with Brown's voice. She wanted to
follow, but he stopped her by the table where his cap had rested that night,
from which he had taken her photograph.
"You might give me a minute," he said.
She faced him.
"What do you want? Why did you come here, Mr. Morton?"
"For this minute."
"You've heard what's happened," she said, scornfully, "and you can persist
in such nonsense."
"Call it anything you please," he said. "To me such nonsense happens to be
vital. It's your fault that I have to take every chance, even make one out of a
tragedy like that."
He nodded toward the study door through which strained voices vibrated.
"Children, too!—Vanderbilt!—More than a thousand!—Good God,
Brown!"
And Blodgett's roar, throaty with a new ferocity:
"We'll fight the swine now."
George experienced a fresh ill-feeling toward the man, who impressed him
as possessing something of the attributes of such animals. He glanced at
Sylvia's hands.
"You're not going to marry him."
She smiled at him pityingly, but her colour was fuller. He wondered why
she should remain at all when it would be so easy to slip through the
doorway to the protection of Blodgett and the others. Of course to hurt him
again.

"I don't believe you love him. I'm sure you don't. You shan't throw yourself
away."
Her foot tapped the rug. He watched her try to make her smile amused. Her
failure, he told himself, offered proof that he was right.
"One can no longer even be angry with you," she said. "Who gave you a
voice in my destiny?"
"You," he answered, quickly, "and I don't surrender my rights. If I can help
it you're not going to throw away your youth. Why did you tell me first of
all you were going to be married?"
She braced herself against the table, staring at him. In her eyes he caught a
fleeting expression of fright. He believed she was held at last by a curiosity
more absorbing than her temper.
"What do you mean?"
Old Planter's bass tones throbbed to them.
"Nothing can keep us out of the war now."
The words came to George as from a great distance, carrying no
tremendous message. In the whole world there existed for him at that
moment nothing half so important as the lively beauty of this woman whose
intolerance he had just vanquished.
"Your youth belongs to youth," he hurried on, knowing she wouldn't answer
his question. "I've told you this before. I won't see you turn your back on
life. Fair warning! I'll fight any way I can to prevent it."
She straightened, showing him her hands.
"You're very brave. You fight by attacking a woman, by trying behind his
back to injure a very dear man. And you've no excuse whatever for fighting,
as you call it."
"Yes, I have," he said, quickly, "and you know perfectly well that I'm
justified in attacking any man you threaten to marry."
"You're mad, or laughable," she said. "Why have you? Why?"

"Because long ago I told you I loved you. Whether it was really so then, or
whether it is now, makes no difference. You said I shouldn't forget."
He stepped closer to her.
"You said other things that gave me, through pride if nothing else, a pretty
big share in your life. You may as well understand that."
Her anger quite controlled her now. She raised her right hand in the old
impulsive gesture to punish his presumption with the maximum of
humiliation; and this time, also, he caught her wrist, but he didn't hold it
away. He brought it closer, bent his head, and pressed his lips against her
fingers.
He was startled by the retreat of colour from her face. He had never seen it
so white. He let her wrist go. She grasped the table's edge. She commenced
to laugh, but there was no laughter in her blank, colourless expression. A
feminine voice without accent came to them:
"Sylvia! How can you laugh?"
He glanced up. Mrs. Planter stood in the study doorway. Sylvia
straightened; apparently controlled herself. Her colour returned.
"It was Mr. Morton," she explained, unevenly. "He said something so
absurdly funny. Perhaps he hasn't grasped this tragedy."
The others came in, a voluble, horrified group.
"What's the matter with you, George?" Blodgett bellowed. "Don't you
understand what's happened?"
"Not quite," George said, looking at Sylvia, "but I intend to find out."

XIV

To find out, George appreciated at once, would be no simple task.
Immediately Sylvia raised new defences. She seemed abetted by this
incredible happening on a gray sea.
"I shall go," Lambert said. "How about you, George?"

"Why should I go?" George asked. "I haven't thought about it yet."
The scorn in Sylvia's eyes made him uneasy. Why did people have to be so
impulsive? That was the way wars were made.
During the days that followed he did think about it too absorbingly for
comfort, weighing to the penny the sacrifice his unlikely going would
involve. An inherent instinct for a fight could scarcely be satisfied at such a
cost. Patriotism didn't enter his calculations at all. He believed it had
resounding qualities only because it was hollow, being manufactured
exactly as a drum is made. Surely there were enough impulsive and fairly
useless people to do such a job.
Then without warning Wandel confused his apparently flawless logic.
Certainly Wandel was the least impulsive of men and he was also capable of
uncommon usefulness, yet within a week of the sinking he asked George if
he didn't want to move to his apartment to keep things straight during a long
absence.
"Where are you going, Driggs?"
"I've been drifting too long," Wandel answered. "Unless I go somewheres,
do something, I'll become as mellow as Dolly. I've not been myself since
the business started. I suppose it's because I happen to be fond of the French
and the British and a few ideas of theirs. So I'm going to drive an
ambulance for them."
George fancied Wandel's real motive wasn't so easily expressed. He longed
to know it, but you couldn't pump Wandel.
"You're an ass," was all he said.
"Naturally," Wandel agreed. "Only asses go to war."
"Do you think it will help for you to get a piece of shell through your
head?"
"Quite as much as for any other ass."
"Why don't you say what you mean?" George asked, irritably.

"Perhaps you ask that," Wandel drawled, "because you don't understand
what I mean to say."
"I won't take care of your apartment," George snapped. "I won't have any
hand in such a piece of foolishness."
With Goodhue, however, he went to the pier to see Wandel off; absorbed
with the little man the sorrowful and apprehensive atmosphere of the
odorous shed; listened to choked farewells; saw brimming eyes; shared the
pallid anticipations of those about to venture forth upon an unnatural sea;
touched at last the very fringe of war.
"Why is he doing it?" George asked as Goodhue and he drove across town
to the subway. "I've never counted Driggs a sentimentalist."
"I'm not sure," Goodhue answered, "this doesn't prove he isn't. He's always
had an acute appreciation of values. Don't you remember? We used to call
him 'Spike'."

George let himself drift with events, but Wandel's departure increased his
uneasiness. Suppose he should be forced by circumstances to abandon
everything; against his better judgment to go? Automatically his thoughts
turned to Squibs. He recalled his advice.
"Don't let your ideas smoulder in your head. Come home and talk them
over."
He sent a telegram and followed it the next day. The Baillys met him at the
station, affectionately, without any reproaches for his long absence. The
menace was in the air here, too, for Mrs. Bailly's first question, sharply
expressed, was:
"You're not going, if——"
"I don't want to go," he answered.
Bailly studied him, but he didn't say anything.

That afternoon there was a boat race on Lake Carnegie. The Alstons drove
the Baillys and George down some hospitable resident's lane to an
advantageous bank near the finish line. They spread rugs and made
themselves comfortable there, but the party was subdued. Squibs and Mr.
Alston didn't seem to care to talk. Betty asked Mrs. Bailly's question,
received an identical answer, and fell silent, too. Only Mrs. Alston appeared
to detect no change in the world, remaining cheerfully imperial as if alarms
couldn't possibly approach her abruptly.
Even to George such a scene, sharing one planet with the violences of
Europe, appeared contradictory. The fancifully garbed undergraduates, who
ran along the bank; the string of automobiles on the towpath opposite; the
white and gleaming pleasure boats in the canal; the shells themselves, with
coloured oar-blades that flashed in the sunlight; most of all the green frame
for this pleasantly exciting contest had an air of telling him that everything
unseen was rumour, dream stuff; either that, or else that the seen was
visionary, while in those remote places existed the only material world, the
revolting and essential realities.
Bailly at last interrupted his revery, with his long, thin arm making a gesture
that included the athletes; the running, youthful partisans.
"How many are we going to lose or get back with twisted minds?"
"Keep quiet," his wife said in a panic.
Mrs. Alston laughed pleasantly.
"Don't worry. Woodrow will keep us out of it."

XV

Back in the little study Bailly expressed his doubt.
"He may do it now, but later——"
"Remember you're not going, George," Mrs. Bailly cried.
"I think not."

She patted his hand, while Bailly looked on with his old expression of
doubt and disapproval. When Mrs. Bailly had left them, George told the
tutor of Wandel's surprising venture, asking his opinion.
"It's hard to form one," Bailly admitted. "He's always puzzled me. Would it
surprise you if I said I think he at least has grafted on his brain some of
Allen's generous views?"
"Oh, come, sir. You can't make war an ideal expression of the brotherhood
of man. Far better that all men should be suspicious strangers."
Bailly drew noisily at his pipe.
"It often pleases you to misunderstand," he said. "Wandel, I fancy, would
take Allen's theories and make something more practical of them.
Understand I am a pacifist—thorough-paced. War is folly. War is dreadful.
It cannot be conceived in a healthy brain. But when a fact rises up before
you you'd better face it. Wandel probably does. The Allens probably don't—
don't realize that we must win this war as the only alternative to the world
pacing of an autocratic foot that would crush social progress like a serpent,
that would boot back the brotherhood of man, since you seem to enjoy the
phrase, unthinkable years."
"After admitting that," George asked, quickly, "you can still tell me that I
ought to accept the point of view of your rotten, illogical Socialists?"
"Even in this war," Bailly confessed, "most socialists are pacifists. No,
they're not an elastic crowd. It amuses me that a lot of the lords of the land,
leading an unthinking portion of the proletariat, will permit them to carry on
their work in spite of themselves."
"I despise such theorists," George burst out. "They are unsound. They are
dangerous."
Bailly smiled.
"Just the same, the very ones they want to reform are going to give them the
opportunity to do it."
"They're all like Allen," George sneered, "purchasable."

Bailly shook his head, waved his pipe vehemently.
"Virtue's flaws don't alter its really fundamental quality."
"Then you agree all Socialists are knaves or fools," George stormed.
"Perhaps, George," Bailly said, patiently, "you'll define a conservative for
me. There. Never mind. Somewhere in between we may find an honest
generosity, a wise sympathy. It may come from this war—a huge and wise
balance of power of the right, an honest recognition of men as individuals
rather than as members of classes. Perhaps your friend Wandel is on the
track of something of the sort. I like to think it is really what the war is
being fought for."
"The war," George said, "is being fought for men with fat paunches and
pocket-books."
"Then you're quite sure you don't want to go?"
"Why should I as long as my stomach and my pocket-book are
comfortable? But I'm not sure whether I'll go or not. That's what worries
me."
"You've made," Bailly said, testily, "enough out of the war to warrant your
giving it something."
George grinned. It was quite like old times.
"Even myself, on top of all the rest I might make out of it by staying back?"
"You're not as selfish as you'd have me believe," Bailly cried.
George quoted a phrase of Wandel's since Bailly seemed just now to
approve of the adventurer.
"The man that keeps himself makes the world better."
Bailly drove him out of the room to dress for dinner.
"I won't talk to you any more," he said. "I won't curse the loiterer at the base
until I am sure he isn't going to climb."

XVI

At least George wouldn't have to decide at once. When it became clear that
for the present Mrs. Alston's optimism was justified he breathed easier. With
Goodhue, Lambert, and Mundy he applied himself unreservedly to his
work. Consequently he didn't visit much, didn't see Sylvia again until the
fall when he met her at a dinner at the Goodhues'. She shrank from him
perceptibly, but there was no escape. He studied her with an easier mind.
No date for her wedding had been set. Until that moment should come there
was nothing he could do. What he would be able to accomplish then was
problematical. Something. She shouldn't throw herself away on Blodgett.
"It must be comforting," he heard her say to Goodhue, "to know if trouble
comes your wonderful firm will be taken care of."
George guessed she had meant him to hear that.
"I'm sure I hope so," Goodhue answered her, "but what do you mean?"
"I heard Mr. Morton say once he didn't think he'd care to go to war. Didn't I,
Mr. Morton?"
Goodhue, clearly puzzled by her manner, laughed.
"Give us something more useful, Sylvia. He's a born fighter."
"I believe I said it," George answered her. "There might be problems here I
couldn't very well desert."
Her eyes wavered. He recalled her hysterical manner that evening at
Oakmont. She still sought chances to hurt him. In spite of Blodgett, then,
she recognized a state of contest between them. He smiled contentedly, for
as long as that persisted his cause was alive.

XVII

It languished, however, during the winter as did Blodgett's hopes of a
speedy wedding. The Planters' Fifth Avenue home remained closed, because
of Mr. Planter's health. Sylvia and her mother went south with him.

Blodgett made a number of flying trips, deserting his affairs to that extent to
be with Sylvia. George was satisfied for the present to let things drift.
Dalrymple certainly had drifted with events. He had taken no pains to hide
the shock of Sylvia's engagement. George of all people could understand
his disappointment, his helpless rage; but Dalrymple hadn't bothered him,
and he had about decided he never would.
One spring day, quite without warning, he appeared in George's office. It
was not long after the Planters' return to Oakmont. What did he want here?
Was there any point spending money on him as matters stood?
He looked at Dalrymple, a good deal surprised, reading the dissipation
recorded in his face, the nervousness exposed by the mobile hands. All at
once he understood why he had come at last. Dalrymple had wandered too
far. The patience of his friends had been exhausted. Perhaps Wandel had
taken George's hint. At any rate, he had let himself in for it.
"An opportunity to make a little money," Dalrymple was mumbling
uneasily. "Need capital. Not much. You said at Blodgett's—just happened to
remember it, and was near——"
"How much?" George demanded, stopping his feeble lies.
Dalrymple, George suspected, because of his manner, asked for less than
half what he had come to get.
"What say to a couple thousand? Make it five hundred more if you can. Not
much in the way of security."
"Never mind the security."
George pressed a button, and directed the clerk who responded to draw up a
note.
"Got to sign something?" Dalrymple asked, suspiciously.
George smiled.
"Do you mind my keeping a little record of where my money goes—in
place of security?"

Dalrymple was quite red.
"All right, if you insist."
"I insist. Care to change your mind?"
"No. Only thought it was just a little loan between—friends."
The word left his tongue with difficulty. George guessed that the other
retained enough decency to loathe himself for having to use it. The
nervousness of the long fingers increased while the clerk prepared the note
and George wrote the check. George put a pen in the unsteady hand.
"Sign here, please."
Dalrymple obeyed with a signature, shaky, barely legible.
"Nice of you to do me a favour. Appreciate it. Thanks."
To George it would have been worth that money to find out just how
Sylvia's extended engagement had affected Dalrymple. Was it responsible
for his speeding up on the dangerous path of pleasure? Of that he could
learn only what the other chose to disclose, probably nothing. But what was
he waiting for now that he had the money? Why were his fingers twitching
faster than ever?
"Didn't see Lambert when I came in," he managed.
"I daresay he's about," George said. "Want him?"
Dalrymple raised his hand.
"That's just it," he whispered. "Rather not see Lambert. Rather this little
transaction were kept sub rosa. You understand. No point Lambert's
knowing."
"Why not?" George asked, coolly, feeling himself on the edge of the truth.
"I'm a little off the Planters," Dalrymple said.
"Since when?"

Dalrymple's face became redder than ever. For a moment his nervousness
abandoned him. He seemed to stiffen with violent thoughts.
"Don't like buying and selling of women in any family. Not as decent as
slavery."
George rose quietly. He hadn't expected just this.
"Be careful," he warned. "What are you talking about?"
"What the whole town talks about," Dalrymple burst out. "You know her. I
ask you. Hasn't she enough without selling herself, body and soul? No
better than an unmentionable——"
George sprang. He didn't stop to tell himself that Dalrymple was
unaccountable, in a sense, out of his head. He didn't dare stop, because he
knew if Dalrymple finished that sentence he would try to kill him.
Dalrymple's mouth fell open, in fact, before the unexpected attack. He
couldn't complete the sentence, didn't try to; drew back against the desk
instead; grasped a convenient ink container; threw it; called shrilly for help.
George shook the streaming black liquid from his face. With his stained
hands he grasped Dalrymple. His fingers tightened with a feeling of
profound satisfaction. No masks now! Finally the enmity of years was
unleashed. He had Dalrymple where he had always wanted him.
"One more word——You been saying that kind of thing——"
The hurrying of many feet in the outer office recalled him. The impulsive
George Morton crept back beneath the veneer. He let Dalrymple go, drew
out his handkerchief, looked distastefully at the black stains on his clothing.
Lambert and Goodhue closed the door on the curious clerks.
"What in heaven's name——"
It was Lambert who had spoken. Goodhue merely shrugged his shoulders,
as if he had all along expected such a culmination.
Dalrymple, fingering his throat spasmodically, sank in a chair. His face
infused. His breath came audibly.

"Caught him harder than I realized," George reflected. He spoke aloud with
his whimsical smile.
"Looks as if I'd lost my temper. I don't often do it."
He had no regret. He was happy. He believed himself nearer Sylvia than he
had ever been. He felt in grasping Dalrymple's throat as if he had touched
her hands.
He failed to give its true value, consequently, to Lambert's angry turning on
him after Dalrymple's shaking accusation.
"Sorry, Lambert. Had to—to do what I could. He—he was rotten
impertinent about—about—Sylvia."

XVIII

Goodhue caught Lambert's arm. In a flash George read the meaning of
Dalrymple's charge. Naturally he was the one to do something of the sort,
had to try it. He had been afraid of Lambert's knowing of the loan. How
much less could he let Lambert learn why George had justifiably shut his
mouth.
"Keep quiet," George warned Lambert. "Dicky! Can you get him out of
here. He needs attention. I'm not a doctor. He hasn't been himself since he
came."
But Lambert wouldn't have it.
"Repeat that, Dolly," he commanded.
George walked to Dalrymple.
"You'll not say another word."
Dalrymple stood up, weaving his fingers in and out; as it were, clasping his
hands to George.
"I'm sorry, Morton. Damn sorry. Forget—forget——"

His voice wandered into a difficult silence, as if he had seen this way, too, a
chance of implicating himself with Sylvia's brother; but his eyes continued
to beg George. They were like the eyes of an animal, caught in a net,
beseeching release.
Goodhue gave him his hat. He took it but drew away from the other's touch
on his arm.
"Don't think I'm not all right," he said in a frightened voice. "Took me by
surprise, but I'm all right—quite all right. Going home."
He glanced at Lambert and again at George, then left the room, pulling at
his necktie, Goodhue anxiously at his heels.
"What about it?" Lambert asked George sharply.
George sat down, still trying to rid himself of the black souvenirs of the
encounter.
"Don't be a fool. I said nothing about your sister—nothing whatever."
He couldn't get rid of Dalrymple's begging eyes, yet why should he spare
him at all?
"The rest of it," he went on, easily, "is between Dalrymple and me."
"I'm not sure," Lambert challenged.
He reminded George of the younger Lambert who had advanced with a
whip in his hand.
"See here," he said. "You can't make me talk about anything I don't care to.
I've told you I didn't mention your sister. I couldn't to that fellow."
Lambert spread his hands.
"What is there about you and Sylvia—ever since that day? I believe you,
but I tried to give you a licking for her sake once, and I'd do it again."
George laughed pleasantly.
"You make me feel young."

Clearly Lambert meant to warn him, for he went on, still aggressive:
"I care more for her than anybody in the world."
The laughter left George's face.
"Anybody?"
Lambert was self-conscious now.
"Just about. See here. What are you driving at?"
George yawned.
"I must wash up. I've a lot of work to do."
"I'd like to know what went on here," Lambert said.
"Why don't you ask Dalrymple, then?"
"Dolly isn't all bad," Lambert offered as he left. "He's been my friend a
good many years."
"Then by all means keep him," George answered, "and keep him to
yourself; but when he comes around hang on to the ink pots."

XIX

His apparent good humour didn't survive the closing of the door. His dislike
of Dalrymple fattened on his memory of the incident. It had left a sting. He
hadn't stopped the man in time. Selling herself! Was she? She appeared to
his mind, no longer intolerant, rather with an air of shame-faced apology for
all the world. That was what hurt. He hadn't stopped Dalrymple in time.
But there was no sale yet, nothing whatever, except an engagement which,
after a year, showed no symptoms of fruition. Blodgett was aware of it, and
couldn't hide his anxiety. Evidently he wanted to talk about it, did talk about
it to George when he met him in the hall not long after Dalrymple's visit.
"Why don't you ever run down to Oakmont with Lambert?" he asked.

Only Blodgett would have put such a question, and perhaps even he
designed it merely as an entrance to his favourite topic. George evaded with
a fairly truthful account of office pressure.
"Old Planter asks after you," Blodgett went on, uncomfortably. "Admires
you, because you've done about what he had at your age, and it was easier
then. Old man's not well. That's tough on Josiah."
"Tough?"
Blodgett mopped his face with a brilliant handkerchief. His rotund stomach
rose and fell with a sigh.
"His gout's worse—all sorts of complications. She's the apple of his eye.
Guess you know that. Won't desert him now. Wants to wait till he's better, or
—or——"
He added naïvely:
"Hope to heaven he bucks up soon."
George watched Blodgett's hopes dwindle, for Old Planter didn't buck up,
nor did he grow perceptibly worse. From time to time he visited his marble
temple, but for the most part men went to him at Oakmont; Blodgett, of
course, with his double errand of business and romance, most frequently of
all. And Sylvia did cling to her father, but George's satisfaction increased,
for he agreed with Wandel: she was capable of a feeling far more powerful
than filial devotion. Blodgett, clearly, had failed to arouse it.
Her sense of duty, however, kept her nearly entirely away from George; for
Lambert, either because Sylvia had spoken to him, or because he himself
had sensed a false step, failed to repeat his invitation to Oakmont. The row
with Dalrymple, although that had not been mentioned again, made it
unlikely that he ever would.
Dalrymple had dropped out of sight. George heard vaguely that he was
taking a rest cure in the northern part of the state. He couldn't fancy meeting
him again without desiring to add to the punishment he had already given.
The man was impossible. He had sneaked from that room, leaving the note

in George's hands, the check in his own pocket. And the check had been
cashed. No madness of excitement could account for that.
It wasn't until summer that he ran into him, and with a black temper saw
Sylvia at his side. If she only knew! She ought to know. It increased his bad
humour that he couldn't tell her.
He regretted the necessity that had made such a meeting possible. It had,
however, for a long time impressed him. Even flabby old Blodgett had
noticed, and had advised less work and more play. To combat his feeling of
staleness, the relaxing of his long, carefully conditioned muscles, George
had forced himself to play polo at a Long Island club into which he had
hurried because of his skill at the game, or to take an occasional late round
of golf, which he didn't care for particularly but which he managed very
well in view of his inexperience. It was while he was ordering dinner with
Goodhue one night at the Long Island club that Sylvia and Dalrymple drove
up with the Sinclairs. The older pair came straight to the two, while Sylvia
and Dalrymple followed with an obvious reluctance.
"We spirited her away for the night," Mrs. Sinclair explained.
She turned to Sylvia.
"My dear, I'll see that you don't cloister yourself any more. Your father's
going on for years."
Yet it occurred to George, as he looked at her, that her cloistering had
accomplished no change. The alteration in Dalrymple, on the other hand,
was striking. George, as he met him with a difficult ease of manner, quite as
if nothing had happened, couldn't account for it; for the light-headed look
had gone from Dalrymple's eyes, and much of the stamp of dissipation from
his face. His hands, too, were quiet. Was it credible he had forgotten the
struggle in George's office? No. He had cashed the check; yet his manner
suggested a blank memory except, perhaps, for its too-pronounced
cordiality.
There was nothing for it but a dinner together. The Sinclairs expected it, and
couldn't be made to understand why it should embarrass any one.
Dalrymple really helped matters. His mind worked clearly, and he could,
George had to acknowledge, exert a certain charm when he tried. Moreover,

he didn't drink, even refusing the cocktail a waiter offered him just before
they went inside.
As always George disliked speaking to Sylvia in casual tones of indifferent
topics. She met him at first pleasantly enough on that ground—too
pleasantly, so that he found himself waiting for some acknowledgment that
she had not forgotten; that she still believed in their quarrel. It came at last
rather sharply through the topic that was universal just then of General
Wood's civilian training camps at Plattsburgh. Lambert had gone. Goodhue
would follow the next month, having agreed to that arrangement for the
sake of the office. Even Blodgett was there. Sylvia took a great pride in the
fact, pointed it at George.
"Although," she laughed, "I'm told he's not popular with his tent mates. I
hear he has a telephone fastened to his tent pole. I don't know whether that's
true. He's never mentioned it. But I do know he has three secretaries in a
house just off the reservation. Of course it's a sacrifice for him to be at
Plattsburgh at all."
George stared at her. There was no question. Her voice, her face, expressed
a tolerant liking for the man. The engagement had lasted considerably more
than a year, and now she had an air of giving a public reminder of its
ultimate outcome. Or was it for him alone, as her original announcement
had been?
"I'm off next month," Goodhue said. "Lambert writes it's good fun and not
at all uncomfortable."
"I'll be with you, Dicky," Dalrymple put in. "Beneficial affair, besides duty,
and all that."
George experienced relief at the very moment he resented her attack most.
It was still worth while trying to hurt him.
"Practically everyone has gone or is going. It's splendid. When are you
booked for, Mr. Morton?"
Even the Sinclairs had silently asked that question. They looked at him
expectantly.

"I'm not going at all," he answered, bluntly.
"I remember," she said. "You didn't believe in war or something, wasn't it?
But this isn't exactly war."
George smiled.
"Scarcely," he said. "It's hiking, singing, playing cards, rattling off stories,
largely done by some old men who couldn't get a job in the army of
Methuselah. Why should I waste my time at that?"
"It's a start," Mr. Sinclair said, seriously. "We have to do something."
George hid his sneer. Everywhere the spirit was growing to make any kind
of a drum that would bang.
"If you don't think Wilson will keep us out of it," he asked, earnestly, "why
not get after Wilson and make him start something general, efficient,
fundamental? I've never heard of a President who wasn't sensitive to the
pressure of the country."
There was no use talking that way. These people were satisfied with the
noise at Plattsburgh. He was glad when the meal ended, when he could get
away.
At the automobile he managed to help Sylvia into her cloak, and he took the
opportunity to whisper:
"When is the great event coming off?"
She turned, looked at him, and didn't answer. She mounted to the back seat
beside Dalrymple.

XX

George didn't see her again until winter. He heard through the desolate
Blodgett that she had gone with her parents to the Canadian Rockies.
Nearly everyone seemed to flee north that summer as if in a final effort to
cajole play. The Alstons moved to Maine unusually early, and didn't return
until late fall. Betty put it plainly enough to him then.

"I'm sorry to be back. Don't you feel the desire to get as far away as
possible from things, to escape?"
"To escape what, Betty?"
"That's just it. One doesn't know. Something one doesn't want to know."
It was queer that Betty never asked why he hadn't been to Plattsburgh,
never urged a definite decision as to what he would do if——
The "if" lost a little of its power with him. At times he was even inclined to
share Mrs. Alston's optimism. It was easy to drift with Washington. Besides,
he was too busy to worry about much except his growing accumulation of
profits from bloodshed. He was brought back momentarily when Lambert
and Goodhue received commissions as captains in the reserve corps. The
Plattsburgh noise still echoed. He couldn't help a feeling of relief when
people flocked back and the town became normal again, encouraging him
to believe that nothing could happen to tear him away from this fascinating
pursuit of getting rich for Sylvia while he waited for her next move.
That came with a stark brutality a few weeks after the holidays. He had seen
her only the evening before, sitting next to Blodgett at dinner with a remote
expression in her eyes that had made him hopeful. The article in the
morning newspaper, consequently, took him more by surprise than the
original announcement of the engagement had done. Sylvia and Blodgett
would be married on the fifteenth of the following August.
On top of that shock events combined to rebuke his recent confidence. His
desires had taken too much for granted. The folly of the Mrs. Alstons and
the wisdom of the Baillys and Sinclairs were forced upon him. Wilson
wasn't going to keep them out of it. George stood face to face with the
decision he had shirked when the Lusitania had taken her fatal dive.
It couldn't be shirked again, for the declaration of war appeared to be a
matter of days, weeks at the most. The drum was beginning to sound with a
rising resonance. Lambert and Goodhue would be among the first to leave.
Already they made their plans. They didn't seem to care what became of the
business.
"What are you up to, George?" they asked.

He put them off. He wanted to think it out. He didn't care to have his
decision blurred by the rattling of a drum. Yet it was patent to him if he
should go at all it would be with his partners, among the first. The thought
of such a triple desertion appalled him. Mundy was incomparable for
system and routine, but if he had possessed the rare selective foresight
demanded for the steering of a big business he would long since have been
at the helm of his own house. It would be far better, if George had to go, to
sell the stock and the mass of soaring securities the firm had acquired; in
short, to close out before competitors could squeeze the abandoned ship
from the channel.
Why dwell on so wasteful an alternative? Why not turn sanely from so
sentimental a choice? It was clear enough to him that it would not long
survive the war, all this singing and shouting, this driving forth by older
people on the winds of a safe enthusiasm of countless young men to
grotesque places of death.
He paced his room. That was just it. It was the present he had to consider,
and the present thoughts of people who hadn't yet returned to their
inevitable practicality, forgetfulness, and ingratitude; most of all to the
present thoughts of Sylvia. To him she had made those thoughts sufficiently
plain. Among non-combatant enthusiasts she would be the most exigent.
Why swing from choice to choice any longer? To be as he had fancied she
would wish, he had struggled, denied, kept himself clean, sought minutely
for the proper veneer; and so far he had kept his record straight. With her it
was his one weapon. He couldn't throw that away.
He stopped his pacing. He sat before his desk, his head in his hands,
listening to the cacophanous beating of drums by the majority for the
anxious marching of a few.
It was settled. He had always known it would be, in just that way.

XXI

George took his physical examination at Governor's Island with the earliest
of the candidates for the First Officers' Training Camp. As soon as he had
returned to his office he wrote to Bailly:

"I'm going to your cheerful war, after all. I'll drop in the end of the week."
He summoned Lambert and Goodhue. Until then he had told them nothing
definite.
"Of course," he said, "we'll have a few months, but before we leave
America everything will have to be settled. We'll have to know just where
we stand."
Into the midst of their sombre discussion slipped the tinkling of the
telephone. George answered. He glanced at the others.
"It's Blodgett. Wants me right away. Something important."
He hurried down, wondering what was up. Blodgett's voice had vibrated
with an unaccustomed passion that had left with George an impression of
whole-hearted revolt; and when he got in the massive, over-decorated office
his curiosity grew, for Blodgett looked as if he had dressed against time and
without valet or mirror. The straggly pale hair about the ears was rumpled.
His necktie was awry. The pudgy hands shook a trifle. George's heart
quickened. Blodgett had had bad news. What was the worst news Blodgett
could have?
"I know," Blodgett began, "that you and your partners have passed and are
going to Plattsburgh to become officers."
All at once George caught the meaning of Blodgett's disarray, and his hope
was replaced by a mirth he had difficulty hiding.
"You don't mean you've been over to Governor's Island——"
Blodgett stood up.
"Yes," he confessed, solemnly. "Just got back from my physical
examination. Would you believe it, George, the darned fools wouldn't have
me, because I'm too fat? Called it obese, as if it was some kind of a disease,
instead of just my natural inclination to fleshiness."
One of his pudgy hands struck his chest.

"Never stopped to see that my heart's all right, and that's what we want,
people whose hearts are all right."
Momentarily the enmity aroused by circumstances fled from George. The
man was genuine, suffering from a devastating disappointment; but surely
he hadn't called him downstairs only to witness this outbreak.
Blodgett lowered himself to his chair. He wiped his face with one of his gay
handkerchiefs. He spoke reasonably.
"My place is at home. All right. I'll make it easier then for the thin people
that can go. I'm going to look after you boys. Mundy's not big enough. I've
got a man in view I can keep tabs on, and Blodgett'll always be sitting down
here seeing you don't get stung."
He sighed profoundly.
"Guess that'll have to be my share."
George would rather have had the man curse him. It struck directly at his
pride to submit to this unmasking of his jealous opinion. He strangled his
quick impulse to reach forward, to grasp Blodgett's hand, to beg his pardon.
Instead he tried to find ways of avoiding the generous gift.
"We can't settle anything yet. A dozen circumstances may arise. The war
may end——"
"When you go, George," Blodgett said, wistfully.
And George knew that in the end he couldn't refuse without disclosing
everything; that his partners wouldn't let him. It added strangely enough to
his discomfort that he should leave the disappointed man with a confident
feeling that he need make no move to see Sylvia before going to
Plattsburgh. In any case, the camp ought to be over before the fifteenth of
August.
His partners were pleased enough by his recital, and determined to accept
Blodgett's offer.
"He's the most generous soul that ever lived," Goodhue said, warmly.

Lambert agreed, but George thought he detected a troubled light in his eyes.
Blodgett's generosity continued to worry George, to accuse him. After all,
Blodgett had accomplished a great deal more than he. With only one of the
necessities he had made friends, had become engaged to Sylvia Planter. No.
There was something besides that. He had had an unaffected personality to
offer, and—he had said it himself—a heart that was all right.
George asked himself now if Blodgett had helped him in the first place, not
because he had been Mr. Alston and Dicky Goodhue's friend, but simply
because he had liked him. He was inclined to believe it. He had reached the
point where he admitted that many people had been friendly and useful to
him because he had what Blodgett lacked, an exceptional appearance, a
rugged power behind acquired graces. Squibs, he realized, had put his
finger on that long ago. He was glad he was going down. The tutor would
give him his usual disciplinary tonic.
But it was a changed Squibs that met George; a nearly silent Squibs, who
spoke only to praise; a slightly apprehensive Squibs. George tried to
reassure Mrs. Bailly.
"Three months at Plattsburgh, then nobody knows how much longer to
whip our division into shape. The war will probably be over before we get
across."
But she didn't believe it, nor did her husband.
"You'll be in it, George, before the war's over. Do you know, you're nearer
paying me back than you've ever been."
George was uncomfortable before such adulation.
"Please don't think," he protested, "that I'm going over for any tricky ideals
or to save a lot of advanced thinkers from their utter folly."
"Then what are you going for?" Bailly asked.
George was surprised that he lacked an answer.
"Oh, because one has to go," he evaded.

Bailly's smile was contented.
"What better reason could any man want?"
They had an air of showing him about Princeton as if he must absorb its
beauties for the last time. Their visit to the Alstons was shrouded with all
the sullen accompaniments of a permanent farewell. George was inclined to
smile. He hadn't got as far as weighing his chances of being hit; the present
was too crowded, stretched too far; included Betty, for instance, and
Lambert whom he was surprised to find in the Tudor house, prepared to
remain evidently until he should leave for Plattsburgh. The Alstons
misgivings centred rather obviously on Lambert. George, when he took
Betty's hand to say good-bye that evening, felt with a desolate regret that
for the first time in all their acquaintance her fingers failed to reach his
mind.

PART IV
THE FOREST

I

"Profession?"
"Member of the firm of Morton, Planter, and Goodhue."
Slightly startled, a fairly youthful product of West Point twisted on the
uncomfortable orderly room chair, and glanced from the name on George's
card to the tall, well-built figure in a private's uniform facing him. George
knew he looked like a soldier, because some confiding idiot had blankly
told him so coming up on the train; but he hadn't the first knowledge to
support appearances, didn't even know how to stand at attention, was
making an effort at it now since it was clearly expected of him, because he
had sense enough to guess that the pompous, slightly ungrammatical young
man would insist during the next three months on many such tributes.
"I see. You're the Morton."
George was pleased the young man was impressed. He experienced again
the feelings with which he had gone to Princeton. He was being weighed,
not as skilfully as Bailly had done it, but in much the same fashion. He had
a quick thought that it was going to be nice to be at school again.
"Any special qualifications of leadership?"
The question took George by surprise. He hesitated. A reserve officer,
sitting by to help, asked:
"Weren't you captain of the Princeton football team a few years ago?"

"Yes, but we were beaten."
"You must learn to say, 'sir,' Mr. Morton, when you address an officer."
George flushed. That was etching his past rather too sharply. Then he
smiled, and amused at the silly business, mimicked Simpson's servility.
"Very well, sir. I'll remember, sir."
The West Point man was pleased, he was even more impressed, because he
knew football. He made marks on the card. When George essayed a salute
and stepped aside for the next candidate he knew he wasn't submerged in
this mass of splendid individualities which were veiled by the similarity of
their uniforms.
Lambert, Goodhue, and he were scattered among different companies. That
was as well, he reflected, since his partners already wore officers' hat cords.
The spare moments they had, nevertheless, they spent together, mulling
over Blodgett's frequent reports which they never found time thoroughly to
digest. Even George didn't worry about that, for his confidence in Blodgett
was complete at last.
He hadn't time to worry about much, for that matter, beyond the demands of
each day, for Plattsburgh was like Princeton only in that it aroused all his
will power to find the right path and to stick to it. At times he wished for the
nearly smooth brain with which he had entered college. He had acquired too
many wrinkles of logic, of organization, of efficiency, of common-sense, to
survive these months without frequent mad desires to talk out in meeting,
without too much humorous appreciation of some of the arbiters of his
destiny. Regular army officers gave him the impression of having been
forced through a long, perpetually contracting corridor until they had come
out at the end as narrow as one of the sheets of paper work they loved so
well. But he got along with them. That was his business. He was pointed
out enviously as one of the football captains. It was a football captains'
camp. All such giants were slated for company or battery commander's
commissions at least.
If he got it, George wondered if he would hate a captain's uniform as much
as the private's one he wore.

With the warm weather the week-ends offered sometimes a relief. Men's
wives or mothers had taken little houses in the town or among the hills, and
the big hotel on the bluff opened its doors and welcomed other wives and
mothers, and many, many girls who would become both a little sooner than
they had fancied because of this.
Betty arrived among the first, chaperoned for the time by the Sinclairs.
George dined with them, asked Betty about Sylvia, and received evasive
responses. Sylvia was surely coming up later. Betty was absorbed, anyway,
in her own affairs, he reflected unhappily. He felt lost in this huge place
where nearly everyone seemed to be paired.
After dinner Lambert remained with Betty and Mrs. Sinclair, but George
and Mr. Sinclair wandered, smoking, through the grove above the lake.
George had had no idea that the news, for so long half expected, would
affect him as it did.
"I suppose," Sinclair muttered, "you've heard about poor Blodgett."
"What?" George asked, breathlessly. "We've little time for newspapers
here."
"I'm not sure," Sinclair answered, "that it's in the papers, but in town
everybody's talking about it. Sylvia's thrown him over."

II

George paused and considered the glowing end of his cigar. Instead of vast
relief he first of all experienced a quick sympathy for Blodgett. He wanted
to say something; it was expected of him, but he was occupied with the
effort to get rid of this absurd sympathy, to replace it by a profound and
unqualified satisfaction.
"Why? Do you know why?" was all he managed.
That was what he wanted, her private reason for this step which all at once
left the field quite open, and shifted their struggle back to its old, honest
basis. It was what he had told her would happen, must happen. Since she
had agreed at last why had she involved poor old Blodgett at all? Had that

merely been one of her defences which had become finally untenable? Had
George conceivably influenced her to its assumption, at last to its
abandonment?
He stared at the opaque white light which rose like a mist from the waters
of the lake. He seemed to see, as on a screen, an adolescent figure with
squared shoulders and flushed cheeks tearing recklessly along on a horse
that wasn't sufficiently untamed to please its rider. He replaced his cigar
between his lips. Naturally she would be the most exigent of enthusiasts.
Probably that was why Blodgett had been so pitifully anxious to crowd his
bulk into the army. She had to be untrammelled to cheer on the younger,
stronger bodies. That was why she had done it, because war had made her
see that George was right by bringing her to a stark realization of the value
of the younger, stronger bodies.
Sinclair had evidently reached much the same conclusion, for he was saying
something about a whim, no lasting reason——
"I've always cared for Sylvia, but it's hard to forgive her this."
"After all," George said, "Blodgett wasn't her kind. She'd have been
unhappy."
In the opaque light Sinclair stared at him.
"Not her kind! No. I suppose he's his own kind."
Temporarily George had driven forth his sympathy. Blodgett, after all,
hadn't been above some sharp tricks to win such liking and admiration.
Sinclair, of all people, suffering for him!
"I mean," George said, "he'd bought his way, hadn't he, after a fashion, to
her side?"
Sinclair continued to stare.
"I don't quite follow. If you mean Josiah's wanted to play with pleasant
people—yes, but the only buying he's ever done is with his amazing
generosity. He's pulled me for one out of a couple of tight holes after I'd
flown straight in the face of his advice. Nothing but a superb good nature
could be so forgiving, don't you think?"

George walked on, keeping step with Sinclair, saying nothing more;
fighting the old instinct to reach forward, to grasp Blodgett's hand, to beg
his pardon; realizing regretfully, in a sense, that the last support of his
jealous contempt had been swept away. He was angry at the blow to his
self-conceit. It frightened him to have that attacked. He couldn't put up with
it. He would rid himself again of this persistent sympathy for a defeated
rival. Just the same, before accepting any more favours from Blodgett, he
desired to clasp the pudgy hand.
Betty didn't know any more than Sinclair, nor did she care to talk about the
break.
"I can't bear to think of all the happiness torn from that cheerful man."
George studied her face in the light from the windows as they paced up and
down the verandah. There was happiness there in spite of the perplexing
doubt with which she glanced from time to time at him. There was no
question. Betty's kindness had been taken away from him. He tried to be
glad for her, but he was sorry for himself, trying to fancy what his life
would have been if he had permitted his aim to be turned aside, if he had
yielded to the temptation of an unfailing kindness. It had never been in his
nature. Why go back over all that?
"One tie's broken," he said, "and another's made. We're no longer the good
friends we were, because you haven't told me."
Her white cheeks flooded with colour. She half closed her eyes.
"What, George?"
"That the moon is made of honey. I'm really grateful to Lambert for these
few minutes. Don't expect many more. I can't see you go without a little
jealousy, for there have been times when I've wanted you abominably,
Betty."
They had reached the end of the verandah and paused there in a light that
barely disclosed her wondering smile; her wistful, reminiscent expression.
"It's funny," she said with a little catch in her voice, "to look back on two
children. I suppose I felt about the great George Morton as most girls did."

"You flatter me," he said. "Just what do you mean?"
"It's rather tearful one can laugh about such things," she answered. "So long
ago! The great athlete's become a soldier!"
"The stable boy's become a slave," he laughed. "Oh, no. Most girls couldn't
feel much sentiment about that kind of greatness."
"Hush!" she whispered. "You know the night you told me all that I thought
it was a preliminary to your confessing how abominably you wanted me."
"Now, really, Betty——"
"Quite true, George."
"And you ran away."
"And you," she said with a little laugh, "didn't follow."
"Maybe I was afraid of the dragons in the castle. If I'd followed——?"
"We'd have made the dragons angels."
Beneath their jesting he was aware of pain in his heart, in her eyes; a
perception of lost chances, chances that never could have been captured.
One couldn't have everything. She had Lambert. He had nothing. But he
might have had Betty.
He stooped and pressed his lips to her forehead.
"That's as near as I shall ever come," he thought, sorrowfully, wondering,
against his will, if it were true.
"It's to wish you and Lambert happiness," he said aloud.
She raised her fingers to her forehead and let them linger there thoughtfully.
She sighed, straightened, spoke.
"I'm no longer a sentimental girl, but the admiration has survived, grown,
George. Never forget that."
"And the kindness?" he asked.

"Of course," she said. "Why should that ever go?"
But he shook his head.
"All the kindness must be for Lambert. You wouldn't give by halves. When,
Betty?"
"Let us walk back. I've left him an extraordinarily long time."
"When?" he repeated.
"I don't know," she answered. "After the war, if he comes home. Of course,
he wants it before. Lambert hurries one so."
"It's the war," he said, gravely, "that hurries one."

III

"I've wormed it out of Betty," he said to Lambert on the way back to
barracks.
He added congratulations, heartfelt, accompanied by a firm clasp of the
hand; but Lambert seemed scarcely to hear, couldn't wait for George to
finish before breaking in.
"You and Betty have always been like brother and sister. She says so. I've
seen it myself."
George was a trifle uncomfortable.
"What of it?"
"If you get a chance point out to her in your brotherly way that the sooner
she marries me the more time we'll have together outside of heaven. I can't
very well go at her on that tack. Sounds slushy, but you know there's a good
chance of my not coming home, and she insists on waiting."
With all his soul George shrank from such a task. He glanced at the other's
long, athletic limbs.
"There are worse fates than widowhood for war brides," he said, brutally.

Lambert made a wry face.
"All the more reason for grabbing what happiness I can."
"Pure selfishness!" George charged him.
"You talk like a fond parent," Lambert answered. "I believe Betty is the
only one who doesn't think in those terms. She has other reasons; ridiculous
ones. When she tells them to you you'll come on my side."
"Perhaps," George said, vaguely.
Betty's obstinacy wasn't Lambert's only worry. Several times he opened his
mouth as if to speak, and apparently thought better of it. George could
guess the sense of those unexpressed phrases, and could understand why
Lambert should find it difficult to voice them to him. It wasn't until they
were in the sand of the company street, indeed, that Lambert managed to
state his difficulty, in whispers, so that the sleeping barracks shouldn't be
made restless. George noticed that the other didn't mention Sylvia's name,
but it was there in every word, with a sort of apology for her, and a relief
that she wasn't after all going to marry one so much older and less graceful
than herself.
"I wish you'd suggest a way for me to pull out. I've thought it over. I can't
think of any pretty one, but I don't want to be under obligations any longer
to a man who has been treated so shabbily."
It amused George to find himself in the position of a Sinclair, fighting with
Lambert to spare Blodgett's feelings. For Blodgett, Lambert's proposed
action would be the final humiliation.
A day or two later, in fact, Lambert showed George a note he had had from
Blodgett.

"Never let this come up again," a paragraph ran. "If it made any
difference between me and the rest of the family I'd feel I'd got more
than I deserve. I know I'm not good enough for her. Let it go at that
——"

"You're right," Lambert said. "He's entitled to be met just there. I've decided
it shall make no difference to the business."
George was relieved, but Lambert, it was clear, resented the situation,
blamed it on Sylvia, and couldn't wholly refrain from expressing his
disapproval.
"No necessity for it in the first place. Can't see why she picked him, why
she does a lot of things."
"Spoiled!" George offered with a happy grin.
"Prefer to say that myself," Lambert grunted, "although God knows I'm
beginning to think it's true enough."

IV

George doubted if he would see Sylvia at Plattsburgh at all, so frequently
was her visit postponed. Perhaps she preferred to cloister herself really now,
experiencing a sense of shame for the blow circumstances had made her
strike at one who had never quite earned it; yet when she came, just before
the end of camp, he detected no self-consciousness that he could trace to
Blodgett. Lambert and he arrived at the hotel late one Saturday afternoon
and saw her on the terrace with her mother and the Alstons. For weeks
George had forecasted this moment, their first meeting since she had bought
back her freedom at the expense of Blodgett's heart; and it disappointed
him, startled him; for she was—he had never fancied that would hurt—too
friendly. For the first time in their acquaintance she offered her hand
willingly and smiled at him; but she had an air of paying a debt. What debt?
He caught the words "Red Cross," "recreation."
"Rather faddish business, isn't it?" he asked, indifferently.
He was still intrigued by Sylvia's manner. A chorus attacked him. Sylvia
and Betty, it appeared, were extreme faddists. Only Mrs. Planter smiled at
him understandingly from her eminent superiority. As he glanced at his
coarse uniform he wanted to laugh, then his temper caught him. The debt
she desired to pay was undoubtedly the one owed by a people. He wanted to
grasp her and shout in her ear: