"Good Lord!" he said, almost aloud, "in one whole year what have I done? I haven't made one single friend, known what one real man was doing or thinking, done anything I wanted to do, talked out what I wanted to talk, read what I wanted to read, or had time to make the friends I wanted to make. I've been nothing but material—varsity material—society material; I've lost all the imagination I had, and know less than when I came; and I'm the popular man—'the big man'—in the class! Great! Is it my fault or the fault of things up here?"
Where had it all gone—that fine zest for life, that eagerness to know other lives and other conditions, that readiness for whole-souled comradeship with which he had come to Yale? Where was the pride he had felt in the democracy of the class, when he had swung amid the torches and the cheers past the magic battlements of the college, one in the class, with the feeling in the ranks of a consecrated army gathered from the plains and the mountains, the cities and villages of the nation, consecrated to one another, to four years of mutual understanding that would form an imperishable bond wherever on the face of the globe they should later scatter? And, thinking of all this young imagination that somehow had dried up and withered away, he asked himself again and again:
"Is it my fault?"
Across the campus Buck Waters and Dopey McNab, returning from their marauding expedition, came singing, arm in arm:
"Oh, father and mother pay all the bills,
And we have all the fun.
That's the way we do in college life.
Hooray!"
The two pagans passed without seeing him, gloriously, boyishly happy and defiant, and the rollicking banter recalled in bleak contrast all the stern outlines of the lives of seriousness he had felt for the first time.
At first he revolted at the extremes. Then he considered. Even their life and their point of view was something unknown. It was true he was only a part of the machine of college, one of the wheels that had to revolve in its appointed groove. He had thought of himself always as one who led, and suddenly he perceived that it was he who followed.