athetically intent look in his eyes, as if waiting for something the
lecturer would never quite come to. Sometimes Amory would see him squirm
in his seat; and his face would light up; he was on fire to debate a
point.

He grew more abstracted on the street and was even accused of becoming
a snob, but Amory knew it was nothing of the sort, and once when Burne
passed him four feet off, absolutely unseeingly, his mind a thousand
miles away, Amory almost choked with the romantic joy of watching him.
Burne seemed to be climbing heights where others would be forever unable
to get a foothold.

"I tell you," Amory declared to Tom, "he's the first contemporary I've
ever met whom I'll admit is my superior in mental capacity."

"It's a bad time to admit it--people are beginning to think he's odd."

"He's way over their heads--you know you think so yourself when you
talk to him--Good Lord, Tom, you _used_ to stand out against 'people.'
Success has completely conventionalized you."

Tom grew rather annoyed.

"What's he trying to do--be excessively holy?"

"No! not like anybody you've ever seen. Never enters the Philadelphian
Society. He has no faith in that rot. He doesn't believe that public
swimming-pools and a kind word in time will right the wrongs of the
world; moreover, he takes a drink whenever he feels like it."

"He certainly is getting in wrong."

"Have you talked to him lately?"

"No."

"Then you haven't any conception of him."

The argument ended nowhere, but Amory noticed more than ever how the
sentiment toward Burne had changed on the campus.

"It's odd," Amory said to Tom one night when they had grown more
amicable on the subject, "that the people who violently disapprove of
Burne's radicalism are distinctly the Pharisee class--I mean they're the
best-educated men in college--the editors of the papers, like yourself
and Ferrenby, the younger professors.... The illiterate athletes like
Langueduc think he's getting eccentric, but they just say, 'Good old
Burne has got some queer ideas in his head,' and pass on--the Pharisee
class--Gee! they ridicule him unmercifully."

The next morning he met Burne hurrying along McCosh walk after a
recitation.

"Whither bound, Tsar?"

"Over to the Prince office to see Ferrenby," he waved a copy of the
morning's Princetonian at Amory. "He wrote this editorial."

"Going to flay him alive?"

"No--but he's got me all balled up. Either I've misjudged him or he's
sudd