is manner with an unwonted demonstrativeness
and tenderness, and again made him so uncomfortable in her presence
that he was fain to tear himself away and escape from her sight on any
pretext. Her tender glances and confiding manner made him feel like a
brute, and when he kissed her he felt that it was the kiss of a Judas.
Such had been his feelings this evening, and such were the reflections
tersely summed up in that ejaculation,--"George Hunt, you 're an
infernal scamp!" On arriving at Sturgis's room, he found it full of
tobacco smoke, and the usual crowd there, who hailed him vociferously.
For he was one of the most popular men in college, although for a year
or so he had been living outside the buildings. Several bottles stood on
the tables, but the fellows had as yet arrived only at the argumentative
stage of exhilaration, and it so happened that the subject under
discussion at once took Hunt's close attention. Mathewson had been
reading the first volume of Goethe's autobiography, and was indulging in
some strictures on his course in jilting Frederica and leaving the poor
girl heartbroken.

"But, man," said Sturgis, "he didn't want to marry her, and seeing
he didn't, nothing could have been crueler to her, to say nothing of
himself, than to have done so."

"Well, then," said Mathewson, "why did he go and get her in love with
him?"

"Why, he took his risk and she hers, for the fun of the game. She
happened to be the one who paid for it, but it might just as well have
been he. Why, Mat, you must see yourself that for Goethe to have married
then would have knocked his art-life into a cocked hat. Your artist
has just two great foes,--laziness and matrimony. Each has slain
its thousands. Hitch Pegasus to a family cart and he can't go off the
thoroughfare. He must stick to the ruts. I admit that a bad husband
may be a great artist; but for a good husband, an uxorious, contented
husband, there's no chance at all."

"You are neither of you right, as usual," said little Potts, in his
oracular way.

When Potts first came to college, the fellows used to make no end of fun
of the air of superior and conclusive wisdom with which he assumed
to lay down the law on every question, this being the more laughable
because he was such a little chap. Potts did not pay the least attention
to the jeers, and finally the jeerers were constrained to admit that
if he did have an absurdly pretentious way of talking, his talk was
unusual