“Sam! That’s a come-down after Archer. I’ll call you Archer; you call me Peck. I’ll take one side of the room, you the other. You’ve turned me out of my bedroom, I see.”
“Yes. I thought you weren’t coming. You can change again if you want to.”
“It isn’t worth the trouble. What do you want to lock yourself in for?”
“Some fellows came in here last night and raised a row. I wanted to be let alone.” Sam gave a short account of the experiences of the evening before.
“They won’t try that again now that I’ve got here,” Peck made complacent answer. “It’s foolish to get us into trouble with Alsop,” he added, his tone hardening. “He’ll be down on the room the whole year. It’ll take a lot of soft soap to make him feel right again.”
Sam was silent, convicted of having brought the room into suspicion by unwise conduct, yet puzzled to see wherein his error lay. He was disappointed, too, by the coldness and unfriendliness of this room-mate whom everybody had described as jolly and agreeable.
Peck put on his coat and went to the door. “I guess we can get along together if we let each other alone. Only don’t keep the door locked; I may sometime want to come in.”
Duncan went his way to the house which his fraternity made its headquarters, a little ashamed of his ugliness, but firm in the opinion that this new Archer was a “fresh guy” who would require repression to make him endurable. If Duncan had been forced to give grounds for this dislike, he could in honesty have advanced but two. With the first, Archer was in no way concerned: Duncan did not want a dormitory room-mate at all; he wanted to room with his friends of the Alpha Beta Gamma at Knowles’s. His father, however, who saw in this scheme but an additional incentive to waste time, had vetoed it at once, and written privately to the office to make sure that his son should receive a “good, quiet, studious room-mate” who might help him to become in his turn good, quiet, and studious. By what method of induction the office arrived at the conclusion that Samuel Wadsworth Archer was such a boy is not worth investigation; the office has its whims, and they are not always wrong.
Duncan’s second objection was personal. In moving him out of the bedroom which he had occupied for two years, calmly putting his household goods on the sidewalk, as it were, and taking possession, Archer had shown himself to be a fellow of a consummate and incurable insolence. Duncan didn’t care for the bedroom,—at least, so he assured himself,—but with a fellow of that stamp he wouldn’t even condescend to quarrel.
Duncan did not appear again until just before his afternoon recitation; the evening also he spent elsewhere. During the next day he was at home for hardly two of his waking hours, and during this time he was either dressing or undressing in his bedroom, or talking with fellows who came in, or working at his desk. He was not impolite, and he spoke pleasantly enough when he found occasion to speak at all; but he indulged in no unnecessary conversation and asked no favors, while his general manner indicated clearly his purpose that community of room should not involve community of life.