Darnell was in bed with a throbbing brow and a slight attack of remorse. Lawrence sat down on a trunk which would have held the freshman's clothes if he had taken them off, and cut a good sermon by the dean in order to give himself the chance of preaching one himself.
"Of course it is not strictly any of my business, but I think you are making a big mistake.
"You must know that it is no great pleasure for me to go out of my way to call a man a fool. But you see I have been through all this myself and I know very nearly all there is to know about it. I have been a great fool in college, and if I can do anything that will prevent another from making the mistakes I made, I ought to go ahead and risk hurting his feelings. Oughtn't I? There's nothing hypocritical in that. Is there?
"This thing of wild oats, Darnell, is all wrong, all nonsense, all Tommy-rot. You know that as well as I do. Of course many people say— But those that say such things are either brutes with no finer sensibilities, or else they are liars, or else they never had any wild oats. They don't know what they're talking about.
"Now, of course, I'm only a very young man, after all. Older men, many of them, would laugh and call me a young prig, I suppose. But I know what I'm talking about as regards myself, Darnell. I know the things I have to think about and cannot forget. I know the things that come up and stare me in the face and make me ache. I know— But never mind all that.
"This is what I want to ask of you: Tell me—you've had your little taste of it now, the glamour is rubbed off, you find there is not quite so much in it as you thought—tell me honestly, my boy, do you believe it pays? Don't you think that one morning like this, with a head such as you have now, and the thoughts inside of it, with a sight of those photographs over there on the bureau, is enough to counterbalance all the fun there is in a month of last nights?"
To this long speech the freshman made no reply, because Lawrence did not say a word of it aloud. In fact most of those grand-stand remarks were not thought out until late that night in bed, while rolling over trying to get to sleep. He would not have voiced them to the freshman anyway. Of course not.
It certainly was "not strictly his business" to walk into the room of a nodding acquaintance and call him a fool in long sentences. Lawrence knew that. And it would have been even worse taste to open up his own bosom and drag out his own private worries and dangle them before the eyes of another. It is only in certain short stories that such absurdities are performed by reserved young men. Lawrence was not that kind of a fool.
The Sunday morning conversation ran something like this, while Lawrence tied and untied the freshman's four-in-hand neck-tie about the foot-post of the bed:
"The Fifty-seventh Street Harrisons? Yes, very well. Were they down there?... Is that so?—to Clint Van Brunt? But I don't like her so well as her sister. Grace is a smooth dancer though.... At Sherry's last winter...." And similar nonsense until the conversation swung round to the prospects of the baseball team, which had recently begun practice in the cage. Then they both woke up and said something.