and delightfully through four luxurious and indolent years. There was, God knows, seclusion enough for monastic scholarship, but the rare romantic quality of the atmosphere, the prodigal opulence of Springtime, thick with flowers and drenched in a fragrant warmth of green shimmering light, quenched pretty thoroughly any incipient rash of bookishness. Instead, they loafed and invited their souls or, with great energy and enthusiasm, promoted the affairs of glee-clubs, athletic teams, class politics, fraternities, debating societies, and dramatic clubs. And they talked—always they talked, under the trees, against the ivied walls, assembled in their rooms, they talked—in limp sprawls— incessant, charming, empty Southern talk; they talked with a large easy fluency about God, the Devil, and philosophy, the girls, politics, athletics, fraternities and the girls—My God! how they talked!
“Observe,” lisped Mr. Torrington, the old Rhodes Scholar (Pulpit Hill and Merton,’14), “observe how skilfully he holds suspense until the very end. Observe with what consummate art he builds up to his climax, keeping his meaning hidden until the very last word.” Further, in fact.
At last, thought Eugene, I am getting an education. This must be good writing, because it seems so very dull. When it hurts, the dentist says, it does you good. Democracy must be real, because it is so very earnest. It must be a certainty, because it is so elegantly embalmed in this marble mausoleum of language. Essays For College Men—Woodrow Wilson, Lord Bryce and Dean Briggs.
But there was no word here of the loud raucous voice of America, political conventions and the Big Brass Band, Tweed, Tammany, the Big Stick, lynching bees and black barbecue parties, the Boston Irish, and the damnable machinations of the Pope as exposed by the Babylon Hollow Trumpet (Dem.), the rape of the Belgian virgins, rum, oil, Wall Street and Mexico.
All that, Mr. Torrington would have said, was temporary and accidental. It was unsound.
Mr. Torrington smiled moistly at Eugene and urged him tenderly into a chair drawn intimately to his desk.
