"You never can tell," remarked Adams, rubbing his chin ruefully.
Dodge was examining his eye in the mirror. "No, you never can tell.... Damn it, I'm going to have to get a beefsteak or something for this lamp of mine."
"Say, he ought to be a good man for the fraternity," Adams said suddenly.
"Who?" Dodge's eye was absorbing his entire attention.
"Carver, of course. He ought to make a damn good man."
"Yeah—you bet. We've got to rush him sure."
CHAPTER VIII
The dormitory initiations had more than angered Hugh; they had completely upset his mental equilibrium: his every ideal of college swayed and wabbled. He wasn't a prig, but he had come to Sanford with very definite ideas about the place, and those ideas were already groggy from the unmerciful pounding they were receiving.
His father was responsible for his illusions, if one may call them illusions. Mr. Carver was a shy, sensitive man well along in his fifties, with a wife twelve years his junior. He pretended to cultivate his small farm in Merrytown, but as a matter of fact he lived off of a comfortable income left him by his very capable father. He spent most of his time reading the eighteenth-century essayists, John Donne's poetry, the "Atlantic Monthly," the "Boston Transcript," and playing Mozart on his violin. He did not understand his wife and was thoroughly afraid of his son; Hugh had an animal vigor that at times almost terrified him.