omed to their
ranks, with much clinking of water glasses, another true lover, and
Smith sang derisively an adaptation of his own:

"Pellams Chase, the Glee Club Man,
Swore upon the book
For wife he'd have a cider-can,
For bed the ingle-nook--
Petticoats he thus forsook!"

Instead of raising the expected storm of denial, Pellams looked guilty
and uncomfortable. In spite of their knowledge of the man, they did not
divine that their teasing had given him an inspiration.

[Illustration: THEY DROVE AWAY TOWARD THE LA HONDA REDWOODS.]

His idea for a josh involved Miss Graham. So he waited for her
deliberately outside the door of the French class next morning; she had
stopped to talk to the instructor after the class had left. Jimmy Mason
and four or five of the regular Quad loafers were talking football on
the curbing. Pellams joined them. Then the gravity of the step he was
about to take came over him with a sense of oppression. He felt much as
on that Easter morning, years before, when his mother had dragged him
out to be confirmed.

"The Berkeley faculty won't let Dudley play," Mason was saying. "He
hasn't--where are you speeding in such a rush?" he added and then
stopped, paralyzed.

It is probable that if her eyes had not laughed at him with that twinkle
of good-fellowship which he had noted on the night of the supper,
Pellams never would have had the nerve. That look hauled him over the
Rubicon; they went down the arcade together, in the face of Jimmy Mason,
the loafers, the whole crowd shifting between lectures. Yet the sun
shone as brightly on the palm-circles, the Quadrangle pillars kept their
perpendicular. A little later Mason saw the couple sitting under the
'Ninety-five Oak. He whistled to himself with a look that meant: "You
wait, old josher till you get into the Knockery again!"

"Now," said Pellams, under the Oak, "you have about the same ideas on
love-affairs as I have and you'll sympathize with me in this thing. When
I got in to dinner last night, the gang gave me the hottest jolly of my
misspent life. They're all alike; they can't understand having a
straight friendship for a girl without it's being a puppy-love. So they
tumble at once that my driving you means I'm yours for keeps. That sort
of a thing makes me tres fatigue and I've a scheme."

"Not your first, is it?"

"In what way do you--"

"I know something of your 'schemes,' young man; that fake fraternity and