“Well, I think it’s confoundedly plucky of him, anyhow,” said Klaus. “And for my part I shall get to know him if I can. He’s read an awful lot, they say, and has a damned clever head on his shoulders.”
On his very first day at the College, Peer had learned who Ferdinand Holm was, and had studied him with interest. He was a tall, straight-built fellow with reddish-blond hair and freckled face, and wore a dark tortoiseshell pince-nez. He did not wear the usual College cap, but a stiff grey felt hat, and he looked about four or five and twenty.
“Wait!” thought Peer to himself—“wait, my fine fellow! Yes, you were there, no doubt, when they turned me out of the churchyard that day. But all that won’t help you here. You may have got the start of me at first, and learned this, that, and the other, but—you just wait.”
But one morning, out in the quadrangle, he noticed that Ferdinand Holm in his turn was looking at him, in fact was putting his glasses straight to get a better view of him—and Peer turned round at once and walked away.
Ferdinand, however, had been put into a higher class almost at once, on the strength of his matriculation. Also he was going in for a different branch of the work—roads and railway construction—so that it was only in the quadrangle and the passages that the two ever met.
But one afternoon, soon after Christmas, Peer was standing at work in the big designing-room, when he heard steps behind him, and, turning round, saw Klaus Brock and—Ferdinand Holm.
“I wanted to make your acquaintance,” said Holm, and when Klaus had introduced them, he held out a large white hand with a red seal-ring on the first finger. “We’re namesakes, I understand, and Brock here tells me you take your name from a country place called Holm.”
“Yes. My father was a plain country farmer,” said Peer, and at once felt annoyed with himself for the ring of humility the words seemed to have.
“Well, the best is good enough,” said the other with a smile. “I say, though, has the first-term class gone as far as this in projection drawing? Excuse my asking. You see, we had a good deal of this sort of thing at the Military Academy, so that I know a little about it.”
Thought Peer: “Oh, you’d like to give me a little good advice, would you, if you dared?” Aloud he said: “No, the drawing was on the blackboard—the senior class left it there—and I thought I’d like to see what I could make out of it.”