“Oh—I’m sure now, I will!”
“You have lots of friends, I suppose, entering with you?”
“None at all,” the boy answered quickly, “I come from a private school in New York. There were only ten boys in my class. None of them is coming up here.”
“Then, if I may ask,” the man spoke deferentially, “why are you so confident that you will enjoy your college course?”
Quincy looked up with feeling, at his questioner.
“I seem somehow,” he said, “to have been welcomed.”
There was a note in the boy’s voice that silenced the big man. Quincy, in that moment, felt that Professor Deering must be very sensitive. He also would have been silenced by such a leak of sentiment.
“You make me glad I spoke to you,” he said at last. “Our college is not too well adapted for boys who enter without a crowd. That very fact is a good thing, if the boys really have the stuff.”
Quincy’s amazement here was that a scholar famed throughout America should employ slang.
“What do you mean, exactly, by stuff?” he asked.