"Nothing—not even that—can keep me from accomplishing what I've set out to do. I'll have my way with her."
He shrank, nevertheless, from the thought of her adopting such a defence. It was intolerable. He read the New York papers with growing suspense. As an antidote he attacked harder than ever his study of cause and effect in the Street. With football out of the way he could give a good deal of time to that, and Blodgett now and then enclosed a hint in Mundy's letters. It was possible to send a fair amount of money to his parents; but his mother's letters never varied from their formality of thanks and solicitations as to his health. His father didn't write at all. Of course, they couldn't understand what he was doing. The shadow of the great Planter remained perpetually over their little home.
Another doubt troubled George. With the club matter out of the way, and the presidency of the class his, and a full football garland resting on his head, was he wasting his time at Princeton? The remembrance of Blodgett steadied him. He needed all that Princeton and its companionships could give.
Purposefully he avoided Betty. Was she, indeed, responsible for that softness he had yielded to in the infirmary and during the final game? In his life, he kept telling himself, there was no room for sentiment. Sentiment was childish, a hindrance. Hadn't he decided at the start that nothing should turn him from his attempt for the summit? Still he couldn't avoid seeing Betty now and then in Princeton, or at the dances in New York to which he went with Goodhue. The less he saw of Betty, moreover, the stronger grew his feeling of something essential lacking from his life; and it bothered that, after a long separation, she was invariably friendly instead of reproachful. He found that he couldn't look at her eyes without hungrily trying to picture them wet with tears for him.
To some extent other demands took his mind from such problems. The rumpus Goodhue had foreseen developed. Important men came or wrote from New York or Philadelphia in Dalrymple's cause, but at the meetings of the section George sat obdurate, and, when the struggle approached a crisis, Goodhue came out openly on the side of his room-mate.
"You can have Dalrymple in the club," was George's ultimatum, "or you can have me, but you can't have us both."
If George resigned, Goodhue announced, he would follow. Dalrymple was doomed. The important men went back or ceased writing. Then Wandel slipped Rogers into the charmed circle—the payment of a debt; and George laughed and left the meeting, saying:
"You can elect anybody you please now."
Cynically, he was tempted to try to force Allen in.
"You're not honest even with your own group," he said afterward to Wandel.