“Yes.”
“But—but I’m not one of your friends!”
“Perhaps you may become one—who knows?”
Hooker shook his head with a look of sadness.
“That’s too much!” he declared. “No one here cares to be friendly with me. You don’t know——”
“I know you were in a brown study on the fence, just now, and when a fellow falls into a brown study, he’s likely to get blue. The blues are bad things. Don’t be grouchy, Hooker. What you need is to be stirred up. If I get you into a crowd of good, jolly fellows, it will do you good.”
A look of pleasure came to the outcast’s eyes, but it quickly faded and died away.
“You don’t know,” he said sadly. “They’ll tell you, now that you’ve been seen with me. There’s Chickering pointing us out now, and calling the attention of others to the fact that you are talking with me.”
“Well, if you think for one moment that anything Chickering may say or do will have the slightest influence on my future actions, you are making a big mistake, Hooker. There is no cheaper set in college than Chickering and his gang.”
“But they think themselves too good to have anything to do with me.”