night and off again in the
early morning to get up his work in the library--he was out for the
Princetonian, competing furiously against forty others for the coveted
first place. In December he came down with diphtheria, and some one
else won the competition, but, returning to college in February,
he dauntlessly went after the prize again. Necessarily, Amory's
acquaintance with him was in the way of three-minute chats, walking
to and from lectures, so he failed to penetrate Burne's one absorbing
interest and find what lay beneath it.

Amory was far from contented. He missed the place he had won at St.
Regis', the being known and admired, yet Princeton stimulated him, and
there were many things ahead calculated to arouse the Machiavelli latent
in him, could he but insert a wedge. The upper-class clubs, concerning
which he had pumped a reluctant graduate during the previous summer,
excited his curiosity: Ivy, detached and breathlessly aristocratic;
Cottage, an impressive milange of brilliant adventurers and well-dressed
philanderers; Tiger Inn, broad-shouldered and athletic, vitalized by
an honest elaboration of prep-school standards; Cap and Gown,
anti-alcoholic, faintly religious and politically powerful; flamboyant
Colonial; literary Quadrangle; and the dozen others, varying in age and
position.

Anything which brought an under classman into too glaring a light was
labelled with the damning brand of "running it out." The movies thrived
on caustic comments, but the men who made them were generally running
it out; talking of clubs was running it out; standing for anything
very strongly, as, for instance, drinking parties or teetotalling,
was running it out; in short, being personally conspicuous was not
tolerated, and the influential man was the non-committal man, until at
club elections in sophomore year every one should be sewed up in some
bag for the rest of his college career.

Amory found that writing for the Nassau Literary Magazine would get him
nothing, but that being on the board of the Daily Princetonian would
get any one a good deal. His vague desire to do immortal acting with
the English Dramatic Association faded out when he found that the most
ingenious brains and talents were concentrated upon the Triangle Club, a
musical comedy organization that every year took a great Christmas trip.
In the meanwhile, feeling strangely alone and restless in Commons, with
new desires and ambitions stirring in his mind