."

"Forget your past," Bailly pled, "and remember in the present that the
poor men, who helped elect you, are looking for your guidance. They need
help."

"Then," George said, "why didn't they get themselves elected so they
could help themselves?"

"Into the world there are born many cripples," Bailly said, softly.
"Would you condemn them for not running as fast as the congenitally
sound?"

"Trouble is, they don't try to run," George answered.

He looked at the other defiantly. Bailly had to know. It was his right.

"I can guess what house I'm going to on Prospect Street."

"Which?" Bailly sighed.

"To the very home of reaction," George laughed. "But it's easier to
reform from the inside."

"No," Bailly said, gravely. "The chairs are too comfortable."

He pressed George's arm.

"It isn't the clubs here that worry me in relation to you. It's the
principle of the lights behind the railing in the restless world. Try
not to surrender to the habit of the guarded light."

George was glad when Stringham called from the field.

"Jump in here, Morton!"

He took his turn at the dummy scrimmage. Such exercise failed to offer
its old zest, nor was it the first day he had appreciated that. The
intrusion of these unquiet struggles might be responsible, yet, with
them determined in his favour, his anxiety did not diminish. Was Bailly
to blame with his perpetual nagging about the outside world where grave
decisions waited? George frankly didn't want to face them. They seemed
half-decipherable signposts which tempted him perplexingly and
precariously from his path. What had just happened, added to the passage
of a year and his summer in Wall Street, had brought that headlong world
very close, had outlined too clearly the barriers which made it
dangerous; so even here he spent some time each night studying the
changing lines in the battle for money.

Yet Goodhue, with a settled outlook, shared George's misgivings at the
field.

"It isn't the fun it was Freshman year," he grumbled one night. "We used
to complain then that they worked us too hard. Now I don't believe they
work us hard enough."

That was a serious doubt for two men who realized they alone might save
inferior if eager material from defeat; and it grew until they resumed
surreptitiously the extra work they had attempted hitherto only outside
of the season or just at its commencement. Then it had not interfered
with Green's minutely studied scheme of ph