So Tad Whitelaw did not remember him after having met him accidentally at Guy's. The meeting had been casual, hurried, but it was a meeting. The two had been named to each other. Each had made an inarticulate grunt. But when later that same afternoon they passed in a corridor Tad went by as if he had never seen him.
He continued to live and keep his mouth shut. If he was hurt there was nothing to be gained by saying so. Then an incident occurred which threw them together in a manner which couldn't be ignored inwardly, even if outward conditions remained the same.
Little by little the Harvard student, following the general sobering down which makes it harder for people in the twentieth century to laugh than it was to those who lived fifty years ago, was becoming less frolicsome. Pranks were still played, especially by freshmen, but neither so many nor so wild. The humor had gone out of them.
But in every large company of young men there are a few whose high spirits carry them away. Where they have money to spend and no cares as to the future on their minds, the new sense of freedom naturally runs to roistering. In passing Tad Whitelaw's rooms, which were also in Gore Hall, Tom often heard the banging of the piano, and those shouts of song and laughter which are likely to disturb the proctor. Guy, who was often the one at the piano, now and then gave him a report of a party, telling him who was at it, and what they had had to drink.
In the course of the winter his relations with Guy took on a somewhat different tinge. In Guy's circle, commonly called a gang or a bunch, he was Guy's eccentricity. The Doolittle and Pray spirit allowed of an eccentricity, if it wasn't paraded too much. Guy knew, too, that it helped to make him popular, which was not an easy task, to be known as loyal to a boyhood's chum, when he might be expected to desert him.
But behind this patronage the fat boy found in Tom what he had always found, a source of strength. Not much more than at school did he escape at Harvard his destiny as a butt.
"Same old spiel, damn it," he lamented to Tom, "just because I'm fat. What difference does that make, when you're a sport all right? Doesn't keep me from going with the gang, not any more than Tad Whitelaw's big eyebrows, or Spit Castle's long nose."
On occasions when he was left out of "good things" which he would gladly have been in he made Tom come round to his room in the evening for confidence and comfort. Tom never made game of him. There was no one else to whom he could turn with the certainty of being understood. Having an apartment to himself, he could be free in his complaints without fear of interruption.
It was late at night. The two young men had been "yarning," as they called it, and smoking for the past two hours. Tom was getting up to go back to his room, when a sound of running along the corridor caught their attention.