ieve his credit with Gertie, but he couldn't
betray Bone Stillman. Hastily: "Yes, maybe, that way----Oh, say,
doctor, Pete Jordan was telling me" (liar!) "that you were one of the
best tennis-players at the U."

Gertie sat down again.

The dentist coyly fluffed his hair and deprecated, "Oh no, I wouldn't
say that!"

Carl had won. Instantly they three became a country club of urban
aristocrats, who laughed at the poor rustics of Joralemon for knowing
nothing of golf and polo. Carl was winning their tolerance--though not
their close attention--by relating certain interesting facts from the
inside pages of the local paper as to how far the tennis-rackets sold
in one year would extend, if laid end to end, when he saw Gertie and
her mother glance at the hall. Gertie giggled. Mrs. Cowles frowned. He
followed their glance.

Clumping through the hall was his second cousin, Lena, the Cowleses'
"hired girl." Lena nodded and said, "Hallo, Carl!"

Gertie and the dentist raised their eyebrows at each other.

Carl talked for two minutes about something, he did not know what, and
took his leave. In the intensity of his effort to be resentfully
dignified he stumbled over the hall hat-rack. He heard Gertie yelp
with laughter.

"I _got_ to go to college--be worthy of her!" he groaned, all the way
home. "And I can't afford to go to the U. of M. I'd like to be free,
like Bone says, but I've got to go to Plato."

CHAPTER VI

Plato College, Minnesota, is as earnest and undistinguished, as
provincially dull and pathetically human, as a spinster missionary.
Its two hundred or two hundred and fifty students come from the
furrows, asking for spiritual bread, and are given a Greek root.
Red-brick buildings, designed by the architect of county jails, are
grouped about that high, bare, cupola-crowned gray-stone barracks, the
Academic Building, like red and faded blossoms about a tombstone. In
the air is the scent of crab-apples and meadowy prairies, for a time,
but soon settles down a winter bitter as the learning of the Rev. S.
Alcott Wood, D.D., the president. The town and college of Plato
disturb the expanse of prairie scarce more than a group of haystacks.
In winter the walks blur into the general whiteness, and the trees
shrink to chilly skeletons, and the college is like five blocks set on
a frozen bed-sheet--no shelter for the warm and timid soul, yet no
windy peak for the bold. The snow wipes out all the summer-time
ind