“What difference does it make where we eat?”
“Well, it does.”
“Oh, of course we want to enjoy ourselves.”
Stover saw he did not understand and somehow, feeling all the exuberant enthusiasm that actuated him, he hesitated to continue the explanation.
“By George, Dink,” continued McCarthy comically solicitous of his scheme of decoration, “is there anything like the air of this place? You can’t resist it, can you? Everyone’s out working for something. By George, I hope I can make good!”
“You will,” said Stover. And in his mind was already something of the paternal protection that he had surprised in Hunter, the big man of the Andover crowd.
“If I’m to do anything at football I’ve got to put on a deuce of a lot of weight,” said McCarthy a little disconsolately. “Guess my best chance is at baseball.”
“The main thing, Tough, is to get out and try for everything,” said Stover wisely. “Show you’re a worker and it’s going to count.”
“That’s good advice—who put it into your head?”
“Le Baron talked over a good many things with me,” said Stover slowly. “He gave me a great many pointers. That’s why I said go slow—we want to get with the right crowd.”
“The right crowd?” said McCarthy, wheeling about and staring at his roommate. “What the deuce are you talking about, Dink? Do you mean to say anyone cares who in the blankety-blank we eat with?”
“Yes.”
“What! Who the deuce’s business is it to meddle in my affairs? Right crowd and wrong crowd—there’s only one crowd, and each man’s as good as the other. That’s the way I look at it.” He stopped, amazed, looking over at Stover. “Why, Dink, I never expected you to stand for the right and wrong crowd idea.”
“I don’t mean it the way you do,” said Stover lamely—for he was trying to argue with himself. “We’re trying to do something here, aren’t we—not just loaf through? Well, we want to be with the crowd that’s doing things.”
“Oh, if you mean it that way,” said McCarthy dubiously, “that’s different. I’ve been filled up for the last hour with nothing but society piffle by a measly-faced runt just out of the nursery called Schley. Skull and Bones—Locks and Keys—Wolf’s-Head—gold bugs, hobgoblins, toe the line, heel the right crowd, mind your p’s and q’s, don’t call your soul your own, don’t look at a society house, don’t for heaven’s sake look at a pin in a necktie, never say ‘bones’ or ‘fee-fie-fo-fum’ out loud—never—oh, rats, what bosh!”
“Schley is an odious little toad,” said Stover evasively. A little vain of his new knowledge and the destiny before him, he looked at the budding McCarthy with somewhat the anxiety of a mother hen, and said with great solemnity: “Don’t go off half cock, old fellow.”
“What! Have you fallen for the bugaboo?”
“My dear Tough,” said Stover, with a little gorgeousness, “don’t commit yourself until you know the whole business. You like the feeling here, don’t you—the way everyone is out working for something?”
“You bet I do.”
“Well, it’s the society system that does it.”
“Come off.”
“Wait and see.”
“But what in the name of my aunt’s cat’s pants,” said McCarthy, unwilling to relinquish the red rag, “what in the name of common sense is the holy sacred secret, that it can’t be looked at, talked about, or touched?”
“Don’t be a galoot, Tough,” said Stover, in a superior way; “don’t be a frantic ass. All that’s exaggerated; only little jackasses like Schley are frightened by it. The real side, the serious side, is that the system is built up for the fellows who are going to do something for Yale. Now, just wait until you get your eyes open before you go shooting up the place.”
But, as he stood in his own bedroom, with no Tough McCarthy to instruct and patronize, alone at his window, looking out at the sputtering arc lights with their splotchy regions of light and the busy windows of Pierson Hall across the way, listening to the chapel sending forth its quarter hour over the half-divined campus—he was not quite so confident of all he had proclaimed.
“It’s different—different from school,” he said to himself half apologetically. “It can’t be the same as school. It’s got to be organized differently. It’s the same everywhere.”
He went to bed, to sleep badly, restless and unconvinced, a stranger in strange places, staring at the flickering glare of the arc light against the windowpanes, that light as unreal in comparison with the frank sunlight as the sudden bewildering introduction to the new, complex life was different from the direct and rugged simplicity of the unconscious democracy of school that had gone.
He awoke with a start, to find McCarthy and Dopey McNab, in striped pajamas, solicitously occupied in applying a lather to his bare feet. He sprang up with all the old zest, and, a free scrimmage taking place, wreaked satisfactory vengeance on the intruders.
“Hang you, Stover,” said McNab weakly, “if you’d snored another minute I’d have won my dollar from McCarthy. If you want to be friends, nothing like being friendly, is there? Come on down to my rooms, we’ve got eggs and coffee right on tap. It’s a bore going down to the joint. Tomorrow we’ll all be slaves of the alarm clock again. Hang compulsory chapel.”
They breakfasted hilariously under McNab’s irresistible good humor. When at last Stover sauntered out to reconnoiter in company with McCarthy, a great change had come. The emotions of the night, the restless rebelliousness, had lost all their acuteness and seemed only a blurred memory. The college of the day was a different thing.
The late arrivals were swarming in carriages, or on top of heaped express-wagons, just as the school used to surge hilariously back. The windows were open, crowded with eager heads; the street corners clustered with swiftly assembling groups, sophomores almost entirely, past whom isolated, self-conscious freshmen went with averted gaze, to the occasional accompaniment of a whistled freshman march. Despite himself, Stover began to feel a little tightening in the
