Through the open windows came faintly the strains of a waltz from the band in the college yard. Over the top of a vividly green chestnut-tree the western sky was beginning to glow with the colors of sunset. Now and then a student in cap and gown, or the more brilliant attire appropriate to class-day, hurried past the house; but for the most the little street was deserted and still.
Parmelee had done his duty. He had conscientiously taken part in all the exercises of the day, excepting only those about the tree. When the procession that had marched about the yard and cheered the buildings had dissolved, he had hurried away to his room, lonesome and downhearted.
Every one seemed so disgustingly happy! Fellows with nice mothers and pretty sisters, cousins or sweethearts appeared to flaunt them before Parmelee’s eyes; fellows hurrying off to somebody’s spread thrust him unceremoniously out of the way with muttered apologies. He was so out of it all! He had no womenfolk to take care of, no friends to greet, no spreads to attend. He was simply a nonentity; merely “Parmelee, that hunchbacked fellow.”
That was Parmelee’s trouble. All his life he had been a “hunchback.” As a boy he had often taken flight before the merciless gibes of his companions, too sick at heart to follow his first impulse to stand and fight.
When he had entered the preparatory school he had enclosed himself in a shell of sensitiveness, and had missed many a friendship that might have been his. At college it had been the same. He believed his deformity to be repellent to others, and credited them with sentiments of distaste or pity, when, as was generally the case, the attractiveness of his countenance made them blind to his defect of form. Naturally fond of athletics, he believed himself barred from them. He made few acquaintances and no friends; no friends, that is, except one.
Philip Schuyler and he had met in their freshman year. Schuyler, refusing to be repelled, had won his way through Parmelee’s defenses, and the two had been inseparable until shortly before the last Christmas recess. Then they had quarreled.
The cause had been such a tiny thing that it is doubtful if either still remembered it. Pride had prevented the reconciliation which should have followed, and the two friends had drifted widely apart.
Parmelee sometimes told himself bitterly that Schuyler had made the quarrel an excuse for ending a companionship of which he was wearied. Schuyler had quickly found new friends; Parmelee simply retired more deeply than before into his shell. It meant more to him, that quarrel, than to Schuyler. He had lost the only real friend of his life. The wound was a deep one, and it refused to heal. On this day it ached more than it had for months.
Parmelee glanced at his watch, suddenly realizing that he was hungry. He had missed his lunch. It was yet far from the dinner-hour, he found.
Then he remembered that his boarding-house would be practically given over that evening to a spread. He shrank from the idea of facing the throng that would be present. The restaurants would be crowded. A solitary dinner in town was not attractive. The only alternative was to go dinnerless, or—yes, he could have something here in his room. He smiled a trifle bitterly.