his father and
mother--and the minister--had told him, and he found himself beginning
to discard their ideas. There didn't seem to be any ideas to put in the
place of those he discarded. Until Carl's recent confidence he had
believed firmly in chastity, but he discovered, once the first shock had
worn off, that he liked Carl the unchaste just as much as he had Carl
the chaste. Carl seemed neither better nor worse for his experience.

He was lashed by desire; he was burning with curiosity--and yet, and yet
something held him back. Something--he hardly knew what it was--made him
avoid any woman who had a reputation for moral laxity. He shrank from
such a woman--and desired her so intensely that he was ashamed.

Life was suddenly becoming very complicated, more complicated, it
seemed, every day. With other undergraduates he discussed women and
religion endlessly, but he never reached any satisfactory conclusions.
He wished that he knew some professor that he could talk to. Surely some
of them must know the answers to his riddles....

CHAPTER XVI

Hugh wasn't troubled only by religion and sex; the whole college was
disturbing his peace of mind: all of his illusions were being ruthlessly
shattered. He had supposed that all professors were wise men, that their
knowledge was almost limitless, and he was finding that many of the
undergraduates were frankly contemptuous of the majority of their
teachers and that he himself was finding inspiration from only a few of
them. He went to his classes because he felt that he had to, but in most
of them he was confused or bored. He learned more in the bull sessions
than he did in the class-room, and men like Ross and Burbank were
teaching him more than his instructors.

Further, Nu Delta was proving a keen disappointment. More and more he
found himself thinking of Malcolm Graham's talk to him during the
rushing season of his freshman year. He often wished that Graham were
still in college so that he could go to him for advice. The fraternity
was not the brotherhood that he had dreamed about; it was composed of
several cliques warring with each other, never coalescing into a single
group except to contest the control of a student activity with some
other fraternity. There were a few "brothers" that Hugh liked, but most
of them were not his kind at all. Many of them were athletes taken into
the fraternity because they were athletes and for no other reason, and
although Hugh li