n
support of their argument.

Leonard Gates finally settled the whole matter for Hugh. There had been
many discussions in the Nu Delta living-room about the Prom, and in one
of them Gates ended the argument with a sane and thoughtful statement.

"The Prom was a brawl," he said seriously, "a drunken brawl. We all
admit that. The fact that Proms at other colleges are brawls, too,
doesn't make ours any more respectable. If a Yale man happens to commit
murder and gets away with it, that is no reason that a Harvard man or a
Sanford man should commit murder, too. Some of you are arguing like
babies. But some of you are going to the other extreme.

"You talk as if everybody at the Prom was lit. Well, I wasn't lit, and
as a matter of fact most of them weren't lit. Just use a little common
sense. There were three hundred and fifty couples at the Prom. Now, not
half of them even had a drink. Say that half did. That makes one hundred
and seventy-five fellows. If fifty of those fellows were really soused,
I'll eat my hat, but we'll say that there were fifty. Fifty were quite
enough to make the whole Prom look like a longshoreman's ball. You've
got to take the music into consideration, too. That orchestra could
certainly play jazz; it could play it too damn well. Why, that music was
enough to make a saint shed his halo and shake a shimmy.

"What I'm getting to is this: there are over a thousand fellows in
college, and out of that thousand not more than fifty were really soused
at the Prom, and not more than a hundred and seventy-five were even a
little teed. To go around saying that Sanford men are a lot of muckers
just because a small fraction of them acted like gutter-pups is sheer
bunk. The Prom was a drunken brawl, but all Sanford men aren't
drunkards--not by a damn sight."

Hugh had to admit the force of Gates's reasoning, and he found comfort
in it. He had been just about ready to believe that all college men and
Sanford men in particular were hardly better than common muckers. But in
the end the comfort that he got was small: he realized bitterly that he
was one of the minority that had disgraced his college; he was one of
the gutter-pups. The recognition of that undeniable fact cut deep.

He was determined to redeem himself; he _had_ to, somehow. Living a life
of perfect rectitude was not enough; he had to do something that would
win back his own respect and the respect of his fellows, which he
thought, quite absurdly,