onder how I get away with
it."

"Oh, but you're missing the real point, Tom," Amory interrupted. "You've
just had your eyes opened to the snobbishness of the world in a rather
abrupt manner. Princeton invariably gives the thoughtful man a social
sense."

"You consider you taught me that, don't you?" he asked quizzically,
eying Amory in the half dark.

Amory laughed quietly.

"Didn't I?"

"Sometimes," he said slowly, "I think you're my bad angel. I might have
been a pretty fair poet."

"Come on, that's rather hard. You chose to come to an Eastern college.
Either your eyes were opened to the mean scrambling quality of people,
or you'd have gone through blind, and you'd hate to have done that--been
like Marty Kaye."

"Yes," he agreed, "you're right. I wouldn't have liked it. Still, it's
hard to be made a cynic at twenty."

"I was born one," Amory murmured. "I'm a cynical idealist." He paused
and wondered if that meant anything.

They reached the sleeping school of Lawrenceville, and turned to ride
back.

"It's good, this ride, isn't it?" Tom said presently.

"Yes; it's a good finish, it's knock-out; everything's good to-night.
Oh, for a hot, languorous summer and Isabelle!"

"Oh, you and your Isabelle! I'll bet she's a simple one... let's say
some poetry."

So Amory declaimed "The Ode to a Nightingale" to the bushes they passed.

"I'll never be a poet," said Amory as he finished. "I'm not enough of a
sensualist really; there are only a few obvious things that I notice as
primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea;
I don't catch the subtle things like 'silver-snarling trumpets.' I may
turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre
poetry."

They rode into Princeton as the sun was making colored maps of the sky
behind the graduate school, and hurried to the refreshment of a shower
that would have to serve in place of sleep. By noon the bright-costumed
alumni crowded the streets with their bands and choruses, and in the
tents there was great reunion under the orange-and-black banners that
curled and strained in the wind. Amory looked long at one house which
bore the legend "Sixty-nine." There a few gray-haired men sat and talked
quietly while the classes swept by in panorama of life.

*****

UNDER THE ARC-LIGHT

Then tragedy's emerald eyes glared suddenly at Amory over the edge of
June. On the night after his ride to Lawrenceville a crowd sall