"Oh, father and mother pay all the bills,
And we have all the fun:
That's the way we do—"
The sound died out. Upstairs a piano took up the refrain in a thin, syncopated echo. From time to time a door slammed in his entry, or from without the faint halloo:
"Oh, Jimmy, stick out your head."
Dink, shifting, poked another log into place and returned longingly to his reverie. He could not get from his mind what Swazey had told him. His imagination reconstructed the story that had been given in such bare detail, thrilling at the struggle and the drama he perceived back of it. It was all undivined. When he had thought of his classmates, he had thought of them in a matter-of-fact way as lives paralleling his own.
"Wonder what Regan's story is—the whole story?" he thought musingly. "And Pike and all the rest of—" He hesitated, and then added, "—of the fellows who don't count."
He had heard but one life, but that had disclosed the vista of a hundred paths that here in his own class, hidden away, should open on a hundred romances. He felt, with a sudden realization of the emptiness of his own life, a new zest, a desire to go out and seek what he had ignored before.
He left the fire suddenly, dug into his sweater, and flung a great ulster about him. He went out and across the chilly campus to the very steps where he had gone with Le Baron on his first night, drawing up close to the wall for warmth. And again he thought of the other self, the boyish, natural self, the Dink Stover who had first come here.
What had become of him? Of the two selves it was the boy who alone was real, who gave and received in friendship without hesitating or appraising. He recalled all the old schoolmates with their queer nicknames—the Tennessee Shad, Doc MacNooder, the Triumphant Egghead, and Turkey Reiter. There had been no division there in that spontaneous democracy, and the Dink Stover who had won his way to the top had never sought to isolate himself or curb any natural instinct for skylarking, or sought a reason for a friendship.