play pool, smoke Turkish
cigarettes, and drink beer. They always chorused Plato songs, in
long-drawn close harmony. Once they had imported English ale, out of
bottles, and carried the bottles back to decorate and distinguish
their rooms.

Carl's work at the boarding-house introduced him to pretty girl
students, and cost him no social discredit whatever. The little
college had the virtue of genuine democracy so completely that it
never prided itself on being democratic. Mrs. Henkel, proprietor of
the boarding-house, occasionally grew sarcastic to her student waiters
as she stooped, red-faced and loosened of hair, over the range; she
did suggest that they "kindly wash up a few of the dishes now and then
before they went gallivantin' off." But songs arose from the freshmen
washing and wiping dishes; they chucklingly rehashed jokes; they
discussed the value of the "classical course" _versus_ the "scientific
course." While they waited on table they shared the laughter and
arguments that ran from student to student through Mrs. Henkel's
dining-room--a sunny room bedecked with a canary, a pussy-cat, a
gilded rope portiere, a comfortable rocker with a Plato cushion, a
Garland stove with nickel ornaments, two geraniums, and an oak-framed
photograph of the champion Plato football team of 1899.

Carl was readily accepted by the men and girls who gathered about the
piano in the evening. His graceful-seeming body, his puppyish
awkwardness, his quietly belligerent dignity, his eternal quest of
new things, won him respect; though he was too boyish to rouse
admiration, except in the breast of fat, pretty, cheerful,
fuzzy-haired, candy-eating Mae Thurston. Mae so influenced Carl that
he learned to jest casually; and he practised a new dance, called the
"Boston," which Mae had brought from Minneapolis, though as a rival to
the waltz and two-step the new dance was ridiculed by every one. He
mastered all the _savoir faire_ of the boarding-house. But he was
always hurrying away from it to practise football, to prowl about the
Plato power-house, to skim through magazines in the Y. M. C. A.
reading-room, even to study.

Beyond the dish-washing and furnace-tending set he had no probable
social future, though everybody knew everybody at Plato. Those
immaculate upper-classmen, Murray Cowles and Howard Griffin, never
invited him to their room (in a house on Elm Street with a screened
porch and piano sounds). He missed Ben Rusk, who had gone t