valve and the blue lips, or hear him mumbling his lessons. Then, at night, the other cot would be empty. I think I shall room alone hereafter.
But he roomed the remainder of the term in one of the dormitories. He had two room-mates—one, an Altamont young man who answered to the name of L. K. Duncan (the “L” stood for Lawrence, but every one called him “Elk”) and the other, the son of an Episcopal minister, Harold Gay. Both were several years older than Eugene: Elk Duncan was twenty-four, and Harold Gay, twenty-two. But it is doubtful whether a more precious congress of freaks had ever before gathered in two small rooms, one of which they used as a “study.”
Elk Duncan was the son of an Altamont attorney, a small Democratic politician, mighty in county affairs. Elk Duncan was tall—an inch or two over six feet—and incredibly thin, or rather narrow. He was already a little bald, he had a high prominent forehead, and large pale bulging eyes: from that point his long pale face sloped backward to his chin. His shoulders were a trifle bowed and very narrow; the rest of his body had the symmetry of a lead pencil. He always dressed very foppishly, in tight suits of blue flannel, with high stiff collars, fat silken cravats, and colored silk handkerchiefs. He was a student in the Law School, but he spent a large part of his time, industriously, in avoiding study.
The younger students—particularly the Freshmen—gathered around him after meals with mouths slightly ajar, feeding upon his words like manna, and hungrily demanding more, the wilder his fable became. His posture toward life was very much that of the barker of a carnival sideshow: loquacious, patronizing, and cynical.
The other room-mate, Harold Gay, was a good soul, no older than a child. He wore spectacles, which gave the only glister to the dull grayness of his face; he was plain and ugly without any distinction: he had been puzzled so long by at least four-fifths of the phenomena of existence that he no longer made any effort to comprehend them. Instead, he concealed his shyness and bewilderment under a braying laugh that echoed at all the wrong
