"Say, Boru, have they put you on the bottle yet?"
"Not yet, Lovely. Waiting for you to drop it."
It was not particularly brilliant, but it was good-natured, and there was a certain trick to it that he had lost in the long weeks of Coventry.
Presently the group departed to take the keen edge off the approaching luncheon pangs by a trip to the Jigger Shop, the center of social life.
"Coming, Dink?" said the Gutter Pup.
"I—I'll be over a little later," said Stover, who did and did not want to go.
Left alone, half angry at his own enforced aloofness, and yet desiring solitude, Stover stood among the litter of boxes and gaping trunks and surveyed the four bare walls that spelled for him the word home.
"It's a bully room—bully," he said to himself with a tender feeling of possession. "The Shad's a bully fellow—bully! Dennis is a corker! I'm going to make good; see if I don't! But I'm going slow. They've got to come to me. I won't break in until they want me. Gee! What a peach of a room!"
He went to the window and looked out at the whole panorama of the school that ran beneath him, from the long, rakish lines of the Upper, by Memorial Hall, to the chapel and the circle of Houses that ended at the rear with the Dickinson. Below, boys were streaking across the green depths like water-bugs over limpid surfaces, or hallooing joyfully from window to terrace, greeting one another with bearlike hugs, tumbling about in frolicking heaps. He was on the mountain, they on the plain. His was the imaginative perspective and the troubled vision of one who finds a strange city at his feet.
"It's all there," he said lamely, confused by his own impressions. "All of it."