, sir," answered most of the
questions, he used the phrase on all occasions, and it became the class
joke when, on a query being levelled at him, he was nudged awake by
Ferrenby or Sloane to gasp it out.

Mostly there were parties--to Orange or the Shore, more rarely to
New York and Philadelphia, though one night they marshalled fourteen
waitresses out of Childs' and took them to ride down Fifth Avenue on top
of an auto bus. They all cut more classes than were allowed, which meant
an additional course the following year, but spring was too rare to
let anything interfere with their colorful ramblings. In May Amory was
elected to the Sophomore Prom Committee, and when after a long
evening's discussion with Alec they made out a tentative list of class
probabilities for the senior council, they placed themselves among the
surest. The senior council was composed presumably of the eighteen most
representative seniors, and in view of Alec's football managership and
Amory's chance of nosing out Burne Holiday as Princetonian chairman,
they seemed fairly justified in this presumption. Oddly enough, they
both placed D'Invilliers as among the possibilities, a guess that a year
before the class would have gaped at.

All through the spring Amory had kept up an intermittent correspondence
with Isabelle Borge, punctuated by violent squabbles and chiefly
enlivened by his attempts to find new words for love. He discovered
Isabelle to be discreetly and aggravatingly unsentimental in letters,
but he hoped against hope that she would prove not too exotic a bloom
to fit the large spaces of spring as she had fitted the den in the
Minnehaha Club. During May he wrote thirty-page documents almost
nightly, and sent them to her in bulky envelopes exteriorly labelled
"Part I" and "Part II."

"Oh, Alec, I believe I'm tired of college," he said sadly, as they
walked the dusk together.

"I think I am, too, in a way."

"All I'd like would be a little home in the country, some warm country,
and a wife, and just enough to do to keep from rotting."

"Me, too."

"I'd like to quit."

"What does your girl say?"

"Oh!" Amory gasped in horror. "She wouldn't _think_ of marrying... that
is, not now. I mean the future, you know."

"My girl would. I'm engaged."

"Are you really?"

"Yes. Don't say a word to anybody, please, but I am. I may not come back
next year."

"But you're only twenty! Give up college?"

"Why, Amory, you were saying a minut