tasks all of them more or less menial, all of them adding to
the general drain upon his nerves and body. The rest of the time, his
studies kept him busy. Indeed, it was no small wonder that he was able
to maintain a decent footing in his class, so fagged out and weary was
he by the time he had a moment's leisure to prepare his next-day's
lessons. But prepare them he did, and well, although his eyes grew
heavy over the task and ached with the strain of working by the one dim
light with which his shabby garret room was equipped. It was a single
room, unhappily. Even there, all contact was denied him. Saint Simon,
sitting alone upon his pillar and gazing down upon his fellow men, was
no more solitary than was Scott Brenton. Moreover, Saint Simon had the
final consolation of being quite aware that he was looking down, a
consolation which, to Scott Brenton, was permanently refused.

And then, Andover done, there came college, not one of the small
colleges where individual idiosyncrasies count so much in making up the
estimate of the student's character; but a great university, so great
that it can stop to measure no man by any one trait or any several
traits, so busy that it must grasp him in the round, or not at all.
There lay the fact of Scott Brenton's ultimate salvation. He would have
been downed completely, judged by the finical standards of the little
college.

It was in his choice of college that, for the first time in his life,
Scott Brenton's will had become dominant. His mother would fain have
had it otherwise. The Wheelers, one and all, had been little-college
men. The tradition was in their blood, and she had inherited it to the
full: the strange belief that the smaller college offers less
temptation to go astray; the equally strange belief that the closer
contact with a few professors can quite atone for the lack of friction
against a great crowd of fellow students, alien to one another in
habits of mind and body, yet all of them, swiftly or sluggishly as may
be, moving towards the selfsame goal. It had seemed to Mrs. Brenton
something bordering on the blasphemous when Scott had endeavoured to
put this latter phase of the question before her. Realizing his own
futility upon that score, he finally had changed his tactics and
assured her that, as far as money-earning work went, there were ten
chances in the great college to one in the small.

And Scott was right, albeit his argument was wholly superficial. The