"Bless your heart."
"Put it there."
"Glad to see you again."
"How are you?"
"You look fit as a fiddle!"
"The All-American this year!"
"Hard luck about McCarthy."
"Ta-ta."
His was the popular welcome, and yet it left him unsatisfied, with a strange tugging at his heart. They were all acquaintances, nothing more. He went to his room on the second floor in Lawrence, and, finding his way over the bare floor and the boxes that encumbered, reached the window and flung it open.
Below the different fences had disappeared under the joyful, hilarious groups that swarmed about them. He saw Swazey and Pike, two of the grinds of his own class, men who "didn't count," go past hugging each other, and their joy, comical though it was, hurt him. He turned from the window, saying aloud, sternly, as though commanding himself: