carefully than he ever had before. Broad-browed and strong-chinned,
with a fineness in the honest gray eyes that were like Kerry's,
Burne was a man who gave an immediate impression of bigness and
security--stubborn, that was evident, but his stubbornness wore no
stolidity, and when he had talked for five minutes Amory knew that this
keen enthusiasm had in it no quality of dilettantism.

The intense power Amory felt later in Burne Holiday differed from the
admiration he had had for Humbird. This time it began as purely a
mental interest. With other men of whom he had thought as primarily
first-class, he had been attracted first by their personalities, and
in Burne he missed that immediate magnetism to which he usually
swore allegiance. But that night Amory was struck by Burne's intense
earnestness, a quality he was accustomed to associate only with the
dread stupidity, and by the great enthusiasm that struck dead chords in
his heart. Burne stood vaguely for a land Amory hoped he was drifting
toward--and it was almost time that land was in sight. Tom and Amory and
Alec had reached an impasse; never did they seem to have new experiences
in common, for Tom and Alec had been as blindly busy with their
committees and boards as Amory had been blindly idling, and the things
they had for dissection--college, contemporary personality and the
like--they had hashed and rehashed for many a frugal conversational
meal.

That night they discussed the clubs until twelve, and, in the main, they
agreed with Burne. To the roommates it did not seem such a vital subject
as it had in the two years before, but the logic of Burne's objections
to the social system dovetailed so completely with everything they had
thought, that they questioned rather than argued, and envied the sanity
that enabled this man to stand out so against all traditions.

Then Amory branched off and found that Burne was deep in other things
as well. Economics had interested him and he was turning socialist.
Pacifism played in the back of his mind, and he read The Masses and
Lyoff Tolstoi faithfully.

"How about religion?" Amory asked him.

"Don't know. I'm in a muddle about a lot of things--I've just discovered
that I've a mind, and I'm starting to read."

"Read what?"

"Everything. I have to pick and choose, of course, but mostly things to
make me think. I'm reading the four gospels now, and the 'Varieties of
Religious Experience.'"

"What chiefly started you?"