"I? Mercy, no. I've no idea of upsetting anything. I'm only hoping I can help straighten a few things that have been tumbled over or turned upside down."
Gradually, as they walked and talked, her own affairs—Dumont's and hers—retreated to the background and she gave Scarborough her whole attention. Even in those days—he was then twenty-three—his personality usually dominated whomever he was with. It was not his size or appearance of strength; it was not any compulsion of manner; it was not even what he said or the way he said it. All of these—and his voice contributed; but the real secret of his power was that subtile magnetic something which we try to fix—and fail—when we say "charm."
He attracted Pauline chiefly because he had a way of noting the little things—matters of dress, the flowers, colors in the sky or the landscape, the uncommon, especially the amusing, details of personality—and of connecting these trifles in unexpected ways with the large aspects of things. He saw the mystery of the universe in the contour of a leaf; he saw the secret of a professor's character in the way he had built out his whiskers to hide an absolute lack of chin and to give the impression that a formidable chin was there. He told her stories of life on his father's farm that made her laugh, other stories that made her feel like crying. And—he brought out the best there was in her. She was presently talking of the things about which she had always been reticent—the real thoughts of her mind, those she had suppressed because she had had no sympathetic listener, those she looked forward to talking over with Dumont in that happy time when they would be together and would renew the intimacy interrupted since their High School days.
When she burst in upon Olivia her eyes were sparkling and her cheeks glowing. "The air was glorious," she said, "and Mr. Scarborough; is SO interesting."
And Olivia said to herself: "In spite of his tight clothes he may cure her of that worthless Dumont."
VI.
"LIKE HIS FATHER."
Scarborough soon lifted himself high above the throng, and was marked by faculty and students as a man worth watching. The manner of this achievement was one of those forecasts of the future with which youth bristles for those who take the trouble to watch it.
Although Pierson was only a sophomore he was the political as well as the social leader of his fraternity. Envy said that the Sigma Alphas truckled to his wealth; perhaps the exacter truth was that his wealth forced an earlier recognition of his real capacity. His position as leader made him manager of the Sigma Alpha combination of fraternities and barbs which for six years had dominated the Washington and Jefferson Literary Society. The barbs had always voted humbly with the aristocratic Sigma Alphas; so Pierson's political leadership apparently had no onerous duties attached to it—and he was not the man to make work for himself.