"It's different—different from school," he said to himself half apologetically. "It can't be the same as school. It's got to be organized differently. It's the same everywhere."
He went to bed, to sleep badly, restless and unconvinced, a stranger in strange places, staring at the flickering glare of the arc light against the window-panes, that light as unreal in comparison with the frank sunlight as the sudden bewildering introduction to the new, complex life was different from the direct and rugged simplicity of the unconscious democracy of school that had gone.
He awoke with a start, to find McCarthy and Dopey McNab, in striped pajamas, solicitously occupied in applying a lather to his bare feet. He sprang up with all the old zest, and, a free scrimmage taking place, wreaked satisfactory vengeance on the intruders.
"Hang you, Stover," said McNab weakly, "if you'd snored another minute I'd have won my dollar from McCarthy. If you want to be friends, nothing like being friendly, is there? Come on down to my rooms, we've got eggs and coffee right on tap. It's a bore going down to the joint. To-morrow we'll all be slaves of the alarm clock again. Hang compulsory chapel."
They breakfasted hilariously under McNab's irresistible good humor. When at last Stover sauntered out to reconnoiter in company with McCarthy, a great change had come. The emotions of the night, the restless rebelliousness, had lost all their acuteness and seemed only a blurred memory. The college of the day was a different thing.
The late arrivals were swarming in carriages, or on top of heaped express-wagons, just as the school used to surge hilariously back. The windows were open, crowded with eager heads; the street corners clustered with swiftly assembling groups, sophomores almost entirely, past whom isolated, self-conscious freshmen went with averted gaze, to the occasional accompaniment of a whistled freshman march. Despite himself, Stover began to feel a little tightening in the shoulders, a little uncertainty in the swing of his walk, and something in his back seemed uneasily conscious of the concentrated attack of superior eyes.
They entered the campus, now the campus of the busy day. Across by the chapel, the fence was hidden under continually arriving groups of upper classmen, streaming to it in threes and fours in muscular enthusiasm. There was no division there. Gradually the troubled perceptions of the night before faded from Stover's consciousness. The light he saw was the clear noon of the day, and the air that filled his lungs the atmosphere of life and ambition.
At every step, runners for eating-houses, steam laundries, and tailors thrust cards in their hands, coaxing for orders. Every tree seemed plastered with notices of the awakening year, summons to trials for the musical organizations and the glee club, offers to tutor, announcements of coming competitions, calls for candidates to a dozen activities.
"Hello, Dink, old boy!"
They looked up to behold Charley De Soto, junior over in the Sheffield Scientific School, bearing down upon them.