“There isn’t any beginning,” roared Sears; “it never began, I just looked around and found it there; it had been there all the time; you’ve seen it yourself.” He sat on the floor and rocked to and fro.
“I’m almost inclined to believe that you have lost your mind,” remarked Haydock.
“Just wait, just wait! You’ll be a gibbering idiot yourself when I tell you, only you’ll not believe me! You can’t believe me! I don’t believe it myself! Oh, if you’d only been there!—if you could have seen him! I was writing a letter at my desk when he came in, and told him to sit down. I didn’t even notice him, or what he had on, or anything; and when I turned around—when I turned around—” Wolcott gasped—“when I turned around, I thought it would be McGaw!”
“Oh, go on, who was it?”
“It was McGaw! I’ll never get over the shock of it.” Haydock wrinkled his forehead at this clew.
“Can’t you guess? Don’t you know? Doesn’t something tell you? Try, try! think of the only person in college he could be, if he weren’t himself. Think of the only way I could have found out, the thing that made the difference—the—”
“He isn’t—he isn’t?”—Haydock stuffed his fingers in his ears and shrieked.
“He is, he is!” bellowed Sears. Then they both yelled, and made such a noise that the fellows downstairs came running up to see what was going on.
But they didn’t tell them. They couldn’t, in the first place, and the fellows wouldn’t have understood if they had. The McGaw-Crœsus episode was one of those little interpolated experiences two people own together so completely that they can’t share it if they want to. This one happened to be the kind over which the partners could laugh. When it happens the other way,—when two people get together and cry,—it isn’t nearly as valuable a factor in the divine accident of friendship; there is always one of them who very selfishly does most of the crying. For a time there was only mirth over McGaw. It was natural enough that Wolcott should have but a one-sided appreciation of the affair; he had made a discovery, he had been surprised, he had found it very startling and absurd. It was not to be expected that he would stop laughing to consider McGaw’s feelings in the matter. And Haydock, who was usually thoughtful and considerate, treated the revelation as he did at first, because it had come to him through Wolcott’s eyes. Only when his interest in detail prompted him to ask questions, did he begin to reconstruct the scene in Wolcott’s room, and feel intensely sorry for McGaw.
“What did you say when you turned around and first saw the clothes?” he asked Wolcott.