a faint loose smile and blotted at the comer with a brown smear of tobacco juice. He had bad teeth. His hair was light-brown, dry, and unruly: it stuck out in large untidy mats. He was dressed in the last cheap extreme of the dreadful fashion of the time: skin-tight trousers that ended an inch above his oxford shoes exposing an inch of clocked hose, a bobtailed coat belted in across his kidneys, large striped collars of silk. Under his coat he wore a big sweater with high-school numerals.
Jim Trivett lived with several other students from his community in a lodging-house near Mrs. Bradley’s but closer to the west gate of the university. There were four young men banded together for security and companionship in two untidy rooms heated to a baking dryness by small cast-iron stoves. They made constant preparations for study, but they never studied: one would enter sternly, announcing that he had “a hell of a day tomorrow,” and begin the most minute preparations for a long contest with his books: he would sharpen his pencils carefully and deliberately, adjust his lamp, replenish the red-hot stove, move his chair, put on an eye— shade, clean his pipe, stuff it carefully with tobacco, light, relight, and empty it, then, with an expression of profound relief, hear a rapping on his door.
“Come in the house, Goddamn it!” he would roar hospitably.
“Hello,’Gene! Pull up a chair, son, and sit down,” said Tom Grant. He was a thickly built boy, gaudily dressed; he had a low forehead, black hair, and a kind, stupid, indolent temper.
“Have you been working?”
“Hell, yes!” shouted Jim Trivett. “I’ve been working like a son— of-a-bitch.”
“God!” said Tom Grant, turning slowly to look at him. “Boy, you’re going to choke to death on one of those some day.” He shook his head slowly and sadly, then continued with a rough laugh: “If old man Trivett knew what you were doing with his money, damn if he wouldn’t bust a gut.”
“Gene!” said Jim Trivett, “what the hell do you know about this damned English, anyway?”
“What he doesn’t know about it,” said Tom Grant, “you could write out on the back of a postage stamp. Old man Sanford thinks you’re hell,’Gene.”
