"Which?" Bailly sighed.
"To the very home of reaction," George laughed. "But it's easier to reform from the inside."
"No," Bailly said, gravely. "The chairs are too comfortable."
He pressed George's arm.
"It isn't the clubs here that worry me in relation to you. It's the principle of the lights behind the railing in the restless world. Try not to surrender to the habit of the guarded light."
George was glad when Stringham called from the field.
"Jump in here, Morton!"
He took his turn at the dummy scrimmage. Such exercise failed to offer its old zest, nor was it the first day he had appreciated that. The intrusion of these unquiet struggles might be responsible, yet, with them determined in his favour, his anxiety did not diminish. Was Bailly to blame with his perpetual nagging about the outside world where grave decisions waited? George frankly didn't want to face them. They seemed half-decipherable signposts which tempted him perplexingly and precariously from his path. What had just happened, added to the passage of a year and his summer in Wall Street, had brought that headlong world very close, had outlined too clearly the barriers which made it dangerous; so even here he spent some time each night studying the changing lines in the battle for money.
Yet Goodhue, with a settled outlook, shared George's misgivings at the field.
"It isn't the fun it was Freshman year," he grumbled one night. "We used to complain then that they worked us too hard. Now I don't believe they work us hard enough."