nd on George's shoulder. With the
other she patted his hair.

"What's he scolding my boy for?"

George grinned at Bailly.

"Don't you see, sir, if I were as bad as you think she couldn't do
that?"

Bailly nodded thoughtfully.

"If you've served as you say you must be merely hiding the good."

XXX

To himself at times George acknowledged his badness, in Bailly's terms
at least. He sometimes sympathized with Allen's point of view, even
while he heckled that angular man who often sat with him and Goodhue,
talking about strikes, and violence, and drunkenness as the quickest
recreation for men who had no time for play. He longed to tell Allen in
justification that he had walked out of the working class himself.
Later, staring at Sylvia's portrait, he would grow hard again. Men, he
would repeat, wanted to smash down obstacles only because they didn't
have the strength to scramble over. He had the strength. But Bailly
would intrude again. What about the congenitally unsound?

"I'm not unsound," he would say to himself, studying the picture.

And he suspected that it was because he didn't want to be good that he
was afraid of seeing too much of Betty Alston and her kindliness and the
reminiscence of tears in her eyes. If Squibs only knew how blessedly
easy it would be to turn good, to let ambition and Sylvia slip into a
remote and ugly memory! More frequently now he stared at her portrait,
forcing into his heart the thought of hatred and into her face the
expression of it; for the more hatred there was between them, the
smaller was the chance of his growing weak.

He longed for the approaching escape from his gravest temptation. When
he was through college and definitely in New York he would find it
simpler to be hard. For that matter, why should he grow weak? He had
achieved a success far beyond the common. He would graduate president of
his class, captain of the football team, although he had tried to throw
both honours to Goodhue; member of the club that had drawn the best men
of his year, a power in the Senior Council; the man who had done most
for Princeton; a high-stand scholar; and, most important of all, one who
had acquired with his education a certain amount of culture and an ease
of manner in any company. Allen was still angular, as were most of those
other men who had come here, like George, with nothing behind them.

In his success he saw no miracle, no luck beyond Squibs' early interest.
What he ha