s bed and under it and nearly out of
the window, to prove the value of Professor Frazer and culture. Next
morning Carl and the Turk enrolled in Frazer's optional course in
modern poetry, a desultory series of lectures which did not attempt
Tennyson and Browning. So Carl discovered Shelley and Keats and Walt
Whitman, Swinburne and Rossetti and Morris. He had to read by crawling
from word to word as though they were ice-cakes in a cataract of
emotion. The allusiveness was agonizing. But he pulled off his shoes,
rested his feet on the foot-board of his bed, drummed with a pair of
scissors on his knee, and persisted in his violent pursuit of the
beautiful. Meanwhile his room-mate, Plain Smith, flapped the pages of
a Latin lexicon or took a little recreation by reading the Rev. Mr.
Todd's _Students' Manual_, that gem of the alarm-clock and
water-bucket epoch in American colleges.

Carl never understood Genie Linderbeck's conviction that words are
living things that dream and sing and battle. But he did learn that
there was speech transcending the barking of the Gang.

In the spring of his freshman year Carl gave up waiting on table and
drove a motor-car for a town banker. He learned every screw and spring
in the car. He also made Genie go out with him for track athletics.
Carl won his place on the college team as a half-miler, and viciously
assaulted two freshmen and a junior for laughing at Genie's legs,
which stuck out of his large running-pants like straws out of a
lemonade-glass.

In the great meet with Hamlin University, though Plato lost most of
the events, Carl won the half-mile race. He was elected to the
exclusive fraternity of Ray Cowles and Howard Griffin, Omega Chi
Delta, just before Commencement. That excited him less than the fact
that the Turk and he were to spend the summer up north, in the
hard-wheat country, stringing wire for the telephone company with a
gang of Minneapolis wiremen.

Oh yes. And he would see Gertie in Joralemon.... She had written to
him with so much enthusiasm when he had won the half-mile.

CHAPTER VII

He saw Gertie two hours after he had reached Joralemon for a week's
stay before going north. They sat in rockers on the grass beside her
stoop. They were embarrassed, and rocked profusely and chattily. Mrs.
Cowles was surprised and not much pleased to find him, but Gertie
murmured that she had been lonely, and Carl felt that he must be nobly
patient under Mrs. Cowles's sli