d suffered, his moodiness, his
tendency to pose, his laziness, and his love of playing the fool, were
now taken as a matter of course, recognized eccentricities in a star
quarter-back, a clever actor, and the editor of the St. Regis Tattler:
it puzzled him to see impressionable small boys imitating the very
vanities that had not long ago been contemptible weaknesses.

After the football season he slumped into dreamy content. The night
of the pre-holiday dance he slipped away and went early to bed for the
pleasure of hearing the violin music cross the grass and come surging in
at his window. Many nights he lay there dreaming awake of secret cafes
in Mont Martre, where ivory women delved in romantic mysteries with
diplomats and soldiers of fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian
waltzes and the air was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight
and adventure. In the spring he read "L'Allegro," by request, and was
inspired to lyrical outpourings on the subject of Arcady and the pipes
of Pan. He moved his bed so that the sun would wake him at dawn that he
might dress and go out to the archaic swing that hung from an apple-tree
near the sixth-form house. Seating himself in this he would pump higher
and higher until he got the effect of swinging into the wide air, into
a fairyland of piping satyrs and nymphs with the faces of fair-haired
girls he passed in the streets of Eastchester. As the swing reached its
highest point, Arcady really lay just over the brow of a certain hill,
where the brown road dwindled out of sight in a golden dot.

He read voluminously all spring, the beginning of his eighteenth year:
"The Gentleman from Indiana," "The New Arabian Nights," "The Morals
of Marcus Ordeyne," "The Man Who Was Thursday," which he liked without
understanding; "Stover at Yale," that became somewhat of a text-book;
"Dombey and Son," because he thought he really should read better
stuff; Robert Chambers, David Graham Phillips, and E. Phillips Oppenheim
complete, and a scattering of Tennyson and Kipling. Of all his class
work only "L'Allegro" and some quality of rigid clarity in solid
geometry stirred his languid interest.

As June drew near, he felt the need of conversation to formulate his
own ideas, and, to his surprise, found a co-philosopher in Rahill, the
president of the sixth form. In many a talk, on the highroad or lying
belly-down along the edge of the baseball diamond, or late at night with
their cigarettes glowi