truth of the matter was that his Andover experience had left him sore
and downhearted; that he knew, in the bottom of his boyish soul, that
he must plunge beyond his depth and swim into a wider sea, or else go
down entirely, pushed out of sight beneath the overlapping circles of
the little cliques, all too self-centred to admit of any common focus.

Mrs. Brenton did not care at all about any common focus. The phrase
"college spirit" sounded intemperate, and she would have been the last
person in the world to agree to the belief that Scott could gain any
education from contact with boys of his own age. To her mind, one fusty
old professor out-valued one hundred eager undergraduates, as source of
inspiration to the young. Education, to her mind, lay in the desk-end
of the classroom; it was unthinkable to her that Scott had lost the
best of Andover, by reason of his solitary life there. As for college,
the students, all but Scott, were bound to be full of the wiles of the
devil. Scott's safety lay in his books, and in his keeping too busy in
his off-hours to have time to get into mischief.

Moreover, the purely practical end of the keeping busy was beginning to
loom large upon Mrs. Brenton's horizon. More and more she was coming to
realize that it is no small undertaking for any widow with an almost
imperceptible income to put a son through college. Valiantly she toiled
and scrimped; but it was becoming increasingly necessary for Scott to
help her out in both the toiling and the scrimping. Accordingly, the
creases deepened, both vertically about the corners of Scott's lips and
horizontally across his shiny knees and shoulder blades. His eyes,
though, grew more luminous, as time went on, perhaps because they were
surrounded by ever deepening hollows.

It was those eyes that first caught the attention of Reed Opdyke.
Midway in his sophomore year, Opdyke, with a dozen others of his kind,
had revolted from the monotony of the commons table, and had set up a
so-called joint of their own, an eating-club presided over by a gaunt
and self-helping senior, and served by a quartette of cadaverous and
self-helping sophomores among whom was Scott Brenton.

Reed Opdyke was a busy youngster, full of the countless interests that
cram the college days of a popular, easy-going student. Also he was a
potential leader of men, who gave himself leisure to study the people
with whom he came into any kind of contact, to sort them out and
clas