ss. He would have that card up his sleeve. He would play it
when it would impress most. Skill at games, he hazarded, would make it
easier than he had thought to work his way through.

Whatever distaste such cold calculation brought he destroyed by staring
at Sylvia's remote beauty. If he was to reach such a goal he would have
to use every possible short cut, no matter how unlovely.

He found that evening a radical alteration in Squibs Bailly's study. The
blotter was spattered with ink. Papers littered the desk and drifted
about the floor. Everything within reach of the tutor's hands was
disarranged and disreputably untidy. Bailly appeared incomparably more
comfortable.

The course opened with a small lecture, delivered while the attenuated
man limped up and down the cluttered room.

"Don't fancy," he began, "that you have found in football a key to the
scholastic labyrinth."

His wrinkled face assumed a violent disapproval. His youthful eyes
flashed resentfully.

"Mr. Morton, if I suffered the divine Delphic frenzy and went to the
Dean and assured him you were destined to be one of our very best
undergraduates and at the same time would make fifteen touchdowns
against Yale, and roughly an equal number against Harvard, do you know
what he would reply?"

George gathered that an answer wasn't necessary.

"You might think," the tutor resumed, limping faster than ever, "that he
would run his fingers through his hair, if he had sufficient; would
figuratively flame with pleasure; would say: 'Miraculous, Mr. Bailly.
You are a great benefactor. We must get this extraordinary youth in the
university even if he can't parse "the cat caught the rat."'"

Bailly paused. He clashed his hands together.

"Now I'll tell you what he'd actually reply. 'Interesting if true, Mr.
Bailly. But what are his scholastic attainments? Can he solve a
quadratic equation in his head? Has he committed to memory my favourite
passages of the "Iliad" of Homer and the "Aeneid" of Virgil? Can he name
the architect of the Parthenon or the sculptor of the Aegean pediments?
No? Horrible! Then off with his head!'"

Bailly draped himself across his chair.

"Therefore it behooves us to get to work."

III

That was the first of sixty-odd toilsome, torturing evenings, for Bailly
failed to honour the Sabbath; and, after that first lecture, drab
business alone coloured those hours. The multiplicity of subjects was
confusing; but, although Bailly sel