ed Scarborough to take the fourth place. Not only
did Pierson sit opposite Olivia and Scarborough opposite Pauline three
times a day in circumstances which make for intimacy, but also Olivia
and Pierson studied together in his sitting-room and Pauline and
Scarborough in her sitting-room for several hours three or four times a
week. Olivia and Pierson were sophomores. Pauline and Scarborough
were freshmen; also, they happened to have the same three "senior prep"
conditions to "work off"--Latin, zoology and mathematics.

Such intimacies as these were the matter-of-course at Battle Field.
They were usually brief and strenuous. A young man and a young woman
would be seen together constantly, would fall in love, would come to
know each the other thoroughly. Then, with the mind and character and
looks and moods of each fully revealed to the other, they would drift
or fly in opposite directions, wholly disillusioned. Occasionally they
found that they were really congenial, and either love remained or a
cordial friendship sprang up. The modes of thought, inconceivable to
Europeans or Europeanized Americans, made catastrophe all but
impossible.

It was through the girls that Scarborough got his invitation to the
alcove table. There he came to know Pierson and to like him. One
evening he went into Pierson's rooms--the suite under Olivia and
Pauline's. He had never seen--but had dreamed of--such a luxurious
bachelor interior. Pierson's father had insisted that his son must go
to the college where forty years before he had split wood and lighted
fires and swept corridors to earn two years of higher education.
Pierson's mother, defeated in her wish that her son should go East to
college, had tried to mitigate the rigors of Battle Field's primitive
simplicity by herself fitting up his quarters. And she made them the
show-rooms of the college.

"Now let's see what can be done for you," said Pierson, with the
superiority of a whole year's experience where Scarborough was a
beginner. "I'll put you in the Sigma Alpha fraternity for one thing.
It's the best here."

"I don't know anything about fraternities," Scarborough said. "What are
they for?"

"Oh, everybody that is anybody belongs to a fraternity. There are
about a dozen of them here, and among them they get all the men with
any claim to recognition. Just now, we lean rather toward taking in
the fellows who've been well brought up."

"Does everybody belong to a