ne good result: left to his own devices
his recitations improved tremendously, though this was scant
consolation.

He kept his own company proudly, reading long hours into the land of
Dumas and Victor Hugo; straying up to the 'Varsity diamond, where he
cast himself forlornly on the grass, apart from the groups, to watch
Charlie DeSoto dash around the bases, and wonderful Jo Brown on third
base scrape up the grounders and shoot them to first.

He was too proud to seek other friends, for that meant confession.
Besides, his own classmates were all busy on their own diamonds,
working for the success of their own House nines.

Only when there was a 'Varsity game and he was swallowed up in the
indiscriminate mass that whooped and cheered back of first, thrilling
at a sudden crisis, did he forget himself a little and feel a part of
the great system. Once when, in a game with the Princeton Freshmen, Jo
Brown cleared the bases with a sizzling three-bagger, a fourth-former
he didn't know thumped him ecstatically on the back and he thrilled
with gratitude.

But the rest was loneliness, ever recurrent loneliness, day in and day
out. His only friends were Charlie DeSoto and Butcher Stevens at
first, whom he could watch and understand--feeling, also, the fierce
spirit of battle cooped up and forbidden within him.

One night in the second week of June, when Butsey White had gone to a
festal spread in Cheyenne Baxter's rooms, Dink sat cheerlessly over
the Latin page, seeing neither gerund nor gerundive.

The windows were open to the multiplied chorus of distant frogs and
the drone of near-by insects. The lamp was hot, his clothes steamed on
his back. He thought of the rootbeer and sarsaparilla being consumed
down the hall and, going to the closet, consulted his own store of
comforting things.

But to feast alone was no longer a feast at all. He went to the window
and sniffed the warm air, trying to penetrate the outer darkness.
Then, balancing carefully, he let himself out and, dropping on the
yielding earth, went hungrily up to the campus.

He had never been on the Circle before at night, with all the lights
about him. It gave him a strange, breathless feeling. He sat down,
hugging his knees, in the center of the Circle, where he could command
the blazing windows of the Houses and the long, lighted ranks of the
Upper, where the fourth-formers were singing on the Esplanade. The
chapel at his back was only a shadow; Memorial H