fortunate and happy life that any man had ever known.
Starwick went into a tobacco shop to cash a cheque and the whole place, with its pungent smells of good tobacco, its idling students, its atmosphere of leisure and enjoyment, became incomparably wealthy, rich, exciting as it had never been before.
And later, when the two young men had gone into the “Cock House Tavern” on Brattle Street, the prim and clean little rooms of the old house, the clean starched waitresses and snowy tablecloth, the good food, and several healthy and attractive-looking girls of the New England type all gained an increased value. He felt a thrill of pleasurable anticipation and a feeling of unlimited wealth, simply because Starwick was there ordering the meal, conferring on everything around him the sense of wealth and ease and nameless joy which his wonderful personality, with its magic touch, instantly gave to anything on earth.
Yet during the meal the feeling of hostile constraint between the two young men was not diminished, but grew constantly. Starwick’s impeccable cold courtesy—really the armour of a desperately shy person—his mannered tone, with its strange and disturbing accent, the surgical precision of his cross-examination into the origin, experience, and training of the other youth sharpened a growing antagonism in the other’s spirit, and put him on his guard. Moreover, failure to give any information about himself—above all his complete reticence concerning his association with Professor Hatcher and the reason for his curt and brusquely-worded invitation to dinner—all this began to bear now with oppressive weight upon the other’s spirit. It seemed to him there was a deliberate arrogance in this cold reticence. He began to feel a sullen resentment because of this secretive and mysterious conduct. And later that evening when the two young men parted, the manner of each of them was cold and formal. They bowed stiffly, shook hands with each other coldly, and marched away. It was several months before the younger would again talk to Starwick, and during that period he thought of him with a feeling of resentment, almost of dislike.
IX
That first impact of the city had stunned him with its huge and instant shock, and now, like a swimmer whelmed in a raging storm, he sought desperately among that unceasing flood of faces for one that he knew, one that he could call his own, and suddenly he thought of Uncle
