“Oh, dear, no; he’ll take his car and meet her there. That sailing master of his is a capital man,—perfectly invaluable he’s been to Crœsus. You remember that spring on the Mediterranean?”
“Oh, yes, yes, of course, that time!”
After some such elaborate bit of fooling, Wolcott would roll on the floor in paroxysms of mirth. And all the while McGaw and Wolcott were spending several hours a week in the same room, translating from the same page. Once when Haydock tiptoed in during a seminar to borrow something, Sears glanced up from the Latin Documents and said:
“Crœsus has had a mighty pretty lot of ponies sent up from Virginia,” and Haydock had answered, as he rummaged through the desk:—
“Good work,—I’ll have to look them over.”
Long practice had perfected the technique of their little game; its suggestion of mindless opulence was maddening to McGaw. He had very bitter feelings sometimes. Of late they had all come to an intense sort of focus upon Sears. For in him McGaw was able to detect every human attribute that he especially hated. Sears, on the other hand, though naturally inclined to regard the tutor as a serviceable, if unsightly, machine, became used to his high-strung, underfed personality. He would talk to him now and then, when the effort of concentration became impossible, ask his opinion of certain instructors and their courses,—whether this one was a “snap,” and that one a “stinker,”—what sort of frills he, McGaw, was going to get on his degree, and if he didn’t think the college was “a good deal of a fake, anyhow?” This sort of thing was infinitely more galling to McGaw than a business relation, pure and simple. He remembered that, with other men who interrupted the study hour from time to time, Wolcott talked rowing or horses or—what was even more bewildering—nothing at all, but fooled and laughed with easy intimacy. He resented Sears’s ponderous adaptability to his, the tutor’s, own special topics.
While these two were seeing so much of each other on this uneven basis, May came and went, bringing with it the Class Races and all the other spring novelties. Wolcott’s crew came in second in the race, with seven men in the boat. Some one had broken an oar, or a leg, or an outrigger,—some one always does,—and jumped overboard. So the order in which the four crews splashed over the finish line was, as usual, a tremendous surprise to the black crowd that stretched along the Harvard Bridge, and the sea wall, and the stable roofs back of Beacon Street. Everybody—especially the girls—said the man who jumped was a great, splendid fellow. He was, of course; but the crews and the man himself laughed a good deal when they heard it; they thought that the men who had to stay by a disabled boat and be beaten by half a length showed their sand.
One sweltering day in June, after the examinations had begun, Haydock found Sears in his room, staring helplessly at a small mountain of clothing that reared itself in chaos from his study floor. “What’ll I do?” he asked, mopping his face dejectedly with the tail of a coloured shirt.
“Why, what’s the matter with them?” Haydock turned over a gay straw hat with his foot.
“Oh, everything!” answered Sears; he was warm and cross. “They don’t fit, and they’re hideous, and no good, and in my way, and they make me sick.” He gave the pile a kick that spread it the length of the room.