All his self-reliance had been squeezed out of him. He did not care to be independent now. He did not want to be free. He wanted—oh, how he wanted!—a place to go to and people to care about him, like everyone else. He shrank from the thought of standing alone. He did not feel equal to it. He felt himself to be nothing but a boy, after all, a bad, foolish, wilful, sick boy, and he wanted to run home and, just for once, let his throbbing head fall into his mother's lap and have her hands smooth the ache out of it. But of course he could do nothing of the sort.
The more he thought of it the more impossible it appeared. Why, for four years—he half arose from the rug and his face became hot at the thought of it—for four years he had been doing things that she would not believe him capable of; not if he told her himself. No, he was not going to sneak into the home-fold like a cowardly prodigal, bleating, "I have been a bad little boy, papa. Take me back, and I'll promise not to be bad any more." He was not that kind. He deserved his husks, and he meant to chew them, even though they stuck in his throat. To keep away, he showed himself, was one means left him to regain a little of the self-respect that he had lost.
Then he arose with something of his former indifference and laughed at himself a little. "You've felt sorry for yourself long enough," he said aloud; "what you've got to do now is to make the best of it." He started toward the desk to take the first steps toward making the best of it. He stopped in the middle of the room and looked about at the pictures and the pipes and the books. "I'm done with college," he said, briskly. "Now I feel better."
He lighted a pipe to show himself how much better he felt, and began to word a telegram to Clark. That would finish a good day's work, he thought. A very long day it seemed, too. Some things were hazy and dream-like. That walk with the freshman— But he did not want to think about that, and he wrote down "W. G. Clark, care West, Houston & Co."
Yet, though he tried not to listen, there began coming up to him the tones of the gentle voice dragging in profanity with such pathetic pains. "But I don't want to think about that!" Lawrence exclaimed. But all the while he wrote the message he heard the timid voice with the incongruous words.
"I wish you wouldn't do that," he said aloud. "It bothers me. Why do you want to do that?" He dipped his pen in the ink and held it there. Why did he? Then it came over him with a blush of shame that it was doubtless to find favor in his sight. Most people would have guessed it before.
And then something flashed through his mind, something that he had heard early in the term. A freshman named Jansen, whom he had looked out for when he first arrived, had told him of a freshman that was always talking and asking questions about him. Lawrence had entirely forgotten this, and the recollection of it made him start up from his seat. This accounted for the freshman's haunting him on the campus, gazing at him, imitating his style of dress even.
It was quite ridiculous. He tried to sneer it out of his mind. But he could not. He was finding that there were some things that could not be sneered away. But that was not all.
A big question met him like a huge, choking wave—"What will this boy's future be?" And Lawrence pleaded, "Oh, let me alone! Never mind all that."
The wave drew back and another came drenching over him—"Will he do as you have done?"