ed humor.

"They are incapable of appreciating you," said she, a siren in the red
motor. "You owe it to yourself to enter a larger field. And"--so ran the
languorous voice--"to your friends."

The trustees met on Saturday, with the _Chronicle_ still pounding away
with deadly regularity. Its editorial of the afternoon before was
entitled, "We Want A College President--Not A Class President," and had
frankly urged the trustees of old Blaines to consider whether a change
of administration was not advisable. This was advice which some of the
trustees were only too ready to follow. James E. Winter, coming armed
cap-a-pie to the meeting, suggested that Mr. West withdraw for a time,
which Mr. West properly declined to do. The implacable insurgent
thereupon launched into a bitter face-to-face denunciation of the
president's conduct in the hazing affair, outpacing the _Chronicle_ by
intimating, too plainly for courtesy, that the president's conduct
toward Jones was characterized by duplicity, if not wanting in
consistent adherence to veracity. "I had a hard time to keep from
hitting him," said West afterwards, "but I knew that would be the worst
thing I could possibly do." "Maybe so," sighed Mr. Fyne, apparently not
with full conviction. Winter went too far in moving that the president's
continuance in office was prejudicial to the welfare of Blaines College,
and was defeated 9 to 3. Nevertheless, West always looked back at this
meeting as one of the most unpleasant incidents in his life. He flung
out of it humiliated, angry, and thoroughly sick at heart.

West saw himself as a persecuted patriot, who had laid a costly oblation
on the altar of public spirit only to see the base crowd jostle forward
and spit upon it. He was poor in this world's goods. It had cost him
five thousand a year to accept the presidency of Blaines College. And
this was how they rewarded him. To him, as he sat long in his office
brooding upon the darkness of life, there came a visitor, a tall,
angular, twinkling-eyed, slow-speaking individual who perpetually chewed
an unlighted cigar. He was Plonny Neal, no other, the reputed great
chieftain of city politics. Once the _Post_, in an article inspired by
West, had referred to Plonny as "this notorious grafter." Plonny could
hardly have considered this courteous; but he was a man who never
remembered a grudge, until ready to pay it back with compound interest.
West's adolescent passion for the immediate ref