over that experience minutely in his mind, as if he feared
to lose something of it on approaching home. He could remember
exactly how Mrs. Erlich and the boys had looked to him on that
first night, could repeat almost word for word the conversation
which had been so novel to him. Then he had supposed the Erlichs
were rich people, but he found out afterwards that they were
poor. The father was dead, and all the boys had to work, even
those who were still in school. They merely knew how to live, he
discovered, and spent their money on themselves, instead of on
machines to do the work and machines to entertain people.
Machines, Claude decided, could not make pleasure, whatever else
they could do. They could not make agreeable people, either. In
so far as he could see, the latter were made by judicious
indulgence in almost everything he had been taught to shun.

Since that first visit, he had gone to the Erlichs', not as often
as he wished, certainly, but as often as he dared. Some of the
University boys seemed to drop in there whenever they felt like
it, were almost members of the family; but they were better
looking than he, and better company. To be sure, long Baumgartner
was an intimate of the house, and he was a gawky boy with big red
hands and patched shoes; but he could at least speak German to
the mother, and he played the piano, and seemed to know a great
deal about music.

Claude didn't wish to be a bore. Sometimes in the evening, when
he left the Library to smoke a cigar, he walked slowly past the
Erlichs' house, looking at the lighted windows of the
sitting-room and wondering what was going on inside. Before he
went there to call, he racked his brain for things to talk about.
If there had been a football game, or a good play at the theatre,
that helped, of course.

Almost without realizing what he was doing, he tried to think
things out and to justify his opinions to himself, so that he
would have something to say when the Erlich boys questioned him.
He had grown up with the conviction that it was beneath his
dignity to explain himself, just as it was to dress carefully, or
to be caught taking pains about anything. Ernest was the only
person he knew who tried to state clearly just why he believed
this or that; and people at home thought him very conceited and
foreign. It wasn't American to explain yourself; you didn't have
to! On the farm you said you would or you wouldn't; that
Roosevelt was all right, or