“Well, what did he do?” Haydock was never unprepared to take the other side of any argument in which Ellis engaged. “In the first place, he came into the club so quietly that no one but me noticed him. He sat down and read his mail, and didn’t join in the clatter about the class races, because, knowing something about the subject, what the rest of you fellows had to say probably didn’t interest him; and he isn’t a talkative person, ever. Well, then you tried to get him to subscribe to that foolish night school for æsthetic butchers. I confess his answer was not—not exactly urbane. But it’s just possible that your request was ill-timed.”
“Don’t you think that’s one trouble with Sears?” piped the tiny one, who had become interested. “He always gives you the feeling that everything you say is ‘ill-timed’!”
“The great, big, angry bull!” added Ellis. “And just the other day,” he went on, suddenly remembering another of Wolcott’s atrocities, “he took a letter away from Billy Bemis, held him off with one hand and began to read it,—right out loud in the club; and when Billy snatched it away, Wolcott picked him up and threw him clear across the room on to the divan, and almost broke his back. Now I don’t think that any man who pretends to be a gentleman—”
“Oh, write a letter to the ‘Crimson’ about it—” yelled some one who, though trying to read in the next room, apparently could not help following the discussion.
“He was probably feeling his oats a little that day,” suggested Haydock, placidly. “Why shouldn’t he? He’s just like a fine stallion snorting around a ten-acre lot.”
“Feeling his oats, yes,—that’s all right,” sniffed Ellis. “I suppose he was feeling his oats when he captained his class eleven, and used to curse the men out until everybody talked about it; that is, he cursed out the men who were smaller than himself—if it wasn’t worth his while to keep on the right side of them.”
“For Heaven’s sake shut up!” came from the other room, a trifle impatiently.
“Aren’t we just a little harsh?” asked some one who had been listening without joining in.
“Don’t repeat things like that about Sears, Johnny, even if you like to believe them,” said Haydock, simply. Haydock always seemed a little older—less haphazard in his words—than his contemporaries, and never so much so as when repressing what had once been a temper of the most flaming kind. Ellis—limited, conscientious, uncompromising—created countless occasions for such repression. He was a pale tissue of all the virtues. His sobriety was the kind that drove men to the gutter; his chastity lowered temperatures. Once at a small dinner he inadvertently got drunk and became so austere that the fellows went home. To-night, in running down a member of the club at the club, he had more than irritated Haydock. And then—which in this instance was to the point—the member had been Wolcott. As a matter of fact, Haydock liked Wolcott as he liked very few people. But even if one wasn’t fond of The Magnificent One, he thought, there were so many people all over the college who spent a generous portion of their time in cursing him,—men to whom “Sears Wolcott” was the eponym of snob, and purse-proud arrogance,—that in not sticking up for him, or, at least, in not knowing what was really fine in him, one missed a rare chance of judging by standards other than those of Thomas, Richard, and Henry. Wolcott was a snob, of course; but then he never denied the fact,—he even volunteered the information at times. And there’s hope for that kind of a snob, thought Haydock.
The club—which had a characteristic expression for almost every hour of the day—was beginning to lose what Haydock always thought of as its “just-after-dinner look.” The men had finished their coffee; some of them strolled off to their rooms to grind; others hurried in town to the theatre; two were playing cards rather solemnly in a corner; on the divan, a worn-out athlete had fallen asleep over a comic paper. Haydock finished his cigar and went across to his room in Claverly.