n window when he said this. ... Next
February his mother would wonder why he didn't make a club and increase
his allowance... simple little nut....

Through the smoke and the air of solemn, dense earnestness that filled
the room would come the inevitable helpless cry:

"I don't get it! Repeat that, Mr. Rooney!" Most of them were so stupid
or careless that they wouldn't admit when they didn't understand, and
Amory was of the latter. He found it impossible to study conic sections;
something in their calm and tantalizing respectability breathing
defiantly through Mr. Rooney's fetid parlors distorted their equations
into insoluble anagrams. He made a last night's effort with the
proverbial wet towel, and then blissfully took the exam, wondering
unhappily why all the color and ambition of the spring before had faded
out. Somehow, with the defection of Isabelle the idea of undergraduate
success had loosed its grasp on his imagination, and he contemplated a
possible failure to pass off his condition with equanimity, even though
it would arbitrarily mean his removal from the Princetonian board and
the slaughter of his chances for the Senior Council.

There was always his luck.

He yawned, scribbled his honor pledge on the cover, and sauntered from
the room.

"If you don't pass it," said the newly arrived Alec as they sat on the
window-seat of Amory's room and mused upon a scheme of wall decoration,
"you're the world's worst goopher. Your stock will go down like an
elevator at the club and on the campus."

"Oh, hell, I know it. Why rub it in?"

"'Cause you deserve it. Anybody that'd risk what you were in line for
_ought_ to be ineligible for Princetonian chairman."

"Oh, drop the subject," Amory protested. "Watch and wait and shut up.
I don't want every one at the club asking me about it, as if I were a
prize potato being fattened for a vegetable show." One evening a week
later Amory stopped below his own window on the way to Renwick's, and,
seeing a light, called up:

"Oh, Tom, any mail?"

Alec's head appeared against the yellow square of light.

"Yes, your result's here."

His heart clamored violently.

"What is it, blue or pink?"

"Don't know. Better come up."

He walked into the room and straight over to the table, and then
suddenly noticed that there were other people in the room.

"'Lo, Kerry." He was most polite. "Ah, men of Princeton." They seemed
to be mostly friends, so he picked up the envelope ma