" Goodhue said, indifferently.

"Thanks," George acknowledged as indifferently, and turned away.

Goodhue, it came upon him with a new appreciation of difficulties, was
the proper sort. He watched him walk off with a well-dressed,
weak-looking youth, threading a careless course among his classmates.

"How long have you known this fellow Goodhue?" George asked as he
crossed the campus with Rogers.

"Oh, Goodhue?" Rogers said, uncomfortably. "I've seen him any number of
times. Ran into him last night."

"Good-looking man," George commented. "Where's he come from?"

"You don't know who Dicky Goodhue is!" Rogers cried. "I mean, you must
have heard of his father anyway, the old Richard. Real Estate for
generations. Money grows for them without their turning a hand. Dicky's
up at the best clubs in New York. Plays junior polo on Long Island."

George had heard enough.

"If I do as well with the other exams," he said, "I'm going to get in."

With Freshmen customs what they were, he was thinking, he could appear
as well dressed as the Goodhue crowd. He would take pains with that.

He passed Goodhue on his way to the examination hall that afternoon, and
Goodhue didn't remember him. The incident made George thoughtful. Was
football going to prove the all-powerful lever he had fancied? At any
rate, Rogers' value was at last established.

He reported that evening to Bailly:

"I think it's all right so far."

The tutor grinned.

"To-day's beyond recall, but to-morrow's the future, and it cradles,
among other dragons, French."

He pointed out passages in a number of books.

"Wrestle with those until midnight," he counselled, "and then go to
sleep. Day after to-morrow we'll hope you can apply your boot to a
football again."

Mrs. Bailly stopped him in the hall.

"How did it go?" she asked, eagerly.

Her anxiety had about it something maternal. It gave him for the first
time a feeling of being at home in Princeton.

"I got through to-day," he said.

"Good! Good!"

She nodded toward the study.

"Then you have made him very happy."

"I always want to," George said. "That's a worthy ambition, isn't it?"

She looked at him gropingly, as if she almost caught his allusion.

IX

As George let himself out of the gate a closed automobile turned the
corner and drew up at the curb. The driver sprang down and opened the
door. Betty Alston's white-clad figure emerged and crossed the sidewalk
while George pulled o