ual high-hats. We're intellectual
hypocrites; that's what we are."

"How do you get that way?" Ferdy Hillman, who was walking with Hugh and
Pudge, demanded angrily. "We may not be so hot, but we're a damn sight
better than these guys that work in offices and mills. Jimmie Henley
gives me a pain. He shoots off his gab as if he knew everything. He's
got to show me where other colleges have anything on Sanford. He's a
hell of a Sanford man, he is."

They were walking slowly down the stairs. George Winsor caught up with
them.

"What did you think of it, George?" Hugh asked.

Winsor grinned. "He gave me some awful body blows," he said, chuckling.
"Cripes, I felt most of the time that he was talking only to me. I'm
sore all over. What did you think of it? Jimmie's a live wire, all
right."

"I don't know what to think," Hugh replied soberly. "He's knocked all
the props from under me. I've got to think it over."

He did think it over, and the more he thought the more he was inclined
to believe that Henley was right. Boy-like, he carried Henley's
statements to their final conclusion and decided that the college was a
colossal failure. He wrote a theme and said so.

"You're wrong, Hugh," Henley said when he read the theme. "Sanford has
real virtues, a bushel of them. You'll discover them all right before
you graduate."

CHAPTER XVIII

Sanford's virtues were hard for Hugh to find, and they grew more
inconspicuous as the term advanced. For the time being nothing seemed
worth while: he was disgusted with himself, the undergraduates, and the
fraternity; he felt that the college had bilked him. Often he thought of
the talk he had had with his father before he left for college.
Sometimes that talk seemed funny, entirely idiotic, but sometimes it
infuriated him. What right had his father to send him off to college
with such fool ideas in his head? Nu Delta, the perfect brotherhood!
Bull! How did his father get that way, anyhow? Hugh had yet to learn
that nearly every chapter changes character at least once a decade and
that Nu Delta thirty years earlier had been an entirely different
organization from what it was at present. At times he felt that his
father had deliberately deceived him, but in quieter moments he knew
better; then he realized that his father was a dreamer and an innocent,
a delicately minded man who had never really known anything about
Sanford College or the world either. Hugh often felt older and w