them from the South—the place looks like an earthquake hit it, and the poor devil is up here trying to study for a degree—it’s pretty hard on him. He’s a nice fellow, and he doesn’t deserve it.”
“God!” said Starwick frankly and gravely, “but it sounds dreary! Why did you ever go to such a place?”
“Well, you see, I didn’t know anyone in Cambridge—and I had known these people back home.”
“I should think that would have made you anxious to avoid them,” Starwick answered. “And it’s most important that you have a pleasant place to work in. It really is, you know,” he said earnestly and with a note of reproof in his mannered tone. “You really should be more careful about that,” he said.
“Yes, I suppose it is. You certainly have a good place here.”
“Ace,” said Starwick. “It is very pleasant. I’m glad you like it.”
He came out, with his drink in his hand, put the drink down on a table and sat down beside it, crossing his legs and reaching for one of the straw-tipped cigarettes in a small and curiously carved wooden box. The impression he made on the other youth was one of magnificence and luxury. The boy’s rooms seemed to fit his sensuous and elegant personality like a glove: he was only twenty-two years old, but his distinctive and incomparable quality was everywhere about him in these two rooms.
To the unaccustomed eyes of the younger boy, these modest rooms seemed to be the most magnificent apartment he had seen. For a moment he thought that Starwick must be an immensely wealthy person to live in such a way. The fact that a man so young should live in such splendid and luxurious independence—that he should “have his own place,” an apartment of his own, instead of a rented room, the thrilling solitudes of midnight privacy to himself, the freedom to come and go as he pleased, to do as he wished, to invite to his place whoever he chose, “to bring a girl there” whenever he wanted, without fear or the need for stealth—all these simple things which are just part of the grand and hopeful joy of youth, which the younger boy had never known, but to which he had aspired, as every youth aspires, in many a thrilling fantasy—now made Starwick’s life seem almost impossibly fortunate, happy and exciting.
And yet it was not merely his own inexperience that made Starwick seem so wealthy. Starwick, although he had no regular income save a thousand dollars a year which he received for his work as Professor Hatcher’
