There was about him, somehow, the look of the ruined adventurer—shabby and run-down—the face of the actor shining through its mask of deft gentility, the face of the charlatan looking through its visage of sincerity, and the old veined yellow eyes of ruin, hopelessness, and loss looking through all his attitudes of youth, infectious spontaneity, and grace. And for this reason, somehow, the man seemed pitiably gallant, and Eugene liked him.
He and Morison would go to different pubs and drink until the closing time. Morison was using him vilely, and Eugene knew it and did not care. Not only was he paying for three drinks of every four they drank, but he knew that Morison also sought his companionship because he thought it gave him some immunity from the college proctors when they made their visits to a pub. And this, in fact, he admitted very frankly and with a disarming gleefulness.
“You see,” he said, “if I came in here by myself I’d get progged, but as long as I’m with you I’m probably all right.”
“Why?”
“Oh,” he said, with an exultant little chuckle, “because they don’t know what to make of it! They’ve got their eye on me, all right,” he laughed. “They’ve been giving me some very fishy looks—but when they see you here, they can’t be sure—they don’t know what to make of it!”
“Why don’t they?”
“Oh,” he said, “they’re puzzled about me, but they know about you—they don’t dare to bother you because they know you’re not in the university.”
“How do they know it?” he said resentfully. “I look as much like a student as these Rhodes scholars that you see—yes, and a damned sight more than most of them!”
“Yes, I know,” he said tolerantly. “Still, they know you’re not. They’ve got a way of telling.”
“A way of telling! Good God, Morison, how have they got a way of telling? Do you mean to say they memorize the names and faces of all the students here, the day the term commences?”
“No, it isn’t that. You see, old boy, you don’t belong to them—I don’t know what it is, but they have a way of their own of knowing.”
“Do you mean that there’s some damned mystery about it?—that they’
