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comes here for a rest,” said Monsignor confidentially, treating Amory as a contemporary. “I act as an escape from the weariness of agnosticism, and I think I’m the only man who knows how his staid old mind is really at sea and longs for a sturdy spar like the Church to cling to.”
Their first luncheon was one of the memorable events of Amory’s early life. He was quite radiant and gave off a peculiar brightness and charm. Monsignor called out the best that he had thought by question and suggestion, and Amory talked with an ingenious brilliance of a thousand impulses and desires and repulsions and faiths and fears. He and Monsignor held the floor, and the older man, with his less receptive, less accepting, yet certainly not colder mentality, seemed content to listen and bask in the mellow sunshine that played between these two. Monsignor gave the effect of sunlight to many people; Amory gave it in his youth and, to some extent, when he was very much older, but never again was it quite so mutually spontaneous.
“He’s a radiant boy,” thought Thornton Hancock, who had seen the splendor of two continents and talked with Parnell and Gladstone and Bismarck—and afterward he added to Monsignor: “But his education ought not to be intrusted to a school or college.”
But for the next four years the best of Amory’s intellect was concentrated on matters of popularity, the intricacies of a university social system and American Society as represented by Biltmore Teas and Hot Springs golf-links.
… In all, a wonderful week, that saw Amory’s mind turned inside out, a hundred of his theories confirmed, and his joy of life crystallized to a thousand ambitions. Not that the conversation was scholastic—heaven forbid! Amory had only the vaguest idea as to what Bernard Shaw was—but Monsignor made quite as much out of “The Beloved Vagabond” and “Sir Nigel,” taking good care that Amory never once felt out of his depth.
But the trumpets were sounding for Amory’s preliminary skirmish with his own generation.
“You’re not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not,” said Monsignor.
“I am sorry——”
“No, you’re not. No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.”
“Well——”
“Good-by.”
The Egotist Down.
Amory’s two years at St. Regis’, though in turn painful and triumphant, had as little real significance in his own life as the American “prep” school, crushed as it is under the heel of the universities, has to American life in general. We have no Eton to create the self-consciousness of a governing class; we have, instead, clean, flaccid and innocuous preparatory schools.
He went all wrong at the start, was generally considered both conceited and arrogant, and universally detested. He played football intensely, alternating a reckless brilliancy with a tendency to keep himself as safe from hazard as decency would permit. In a wild panic he backed out of a fight with a boy his own size, to a chorus of scorn, and a week later, in desperation, picked a battle with another boy very much bigger, from which he emerged badly beaten, but rather proud of himself.
He was resentful against all those in authority over him, and this, combined with a lazy indifference toward his work, exasperated every master in school. He grew discouraged and imagined himself a pariah; took to sulking in corners and reading after lights. With a dread of being alone he attached a few friends, but since they were not among the élite of the school, he used them simply as mirrors of himself, audiences before which he might do that posing absolutely essential to him. He was unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy.
There were some few grains of comfort. Whenever Amory was submerged, his vanity was the last part to go below the surface, so he could still enjoy a comfortable glow when “Wookey-wookey,” the deaf old housekeeper, told him that he was the best-looking boy she had ever seen. It had pleased him to be the lightest and youngest man on the first football squad; it pleased him when Doctor Dougall told him at the end of a heated conference that he could, if he wished, get the best marks in school. But Doctor Dougall was wrong. It was temperamentally impossible for Amory to get the best marks in school.
Miserable, confined to bounds, unpopular with both faculty and students—that was Amory’s first term. But at Christmas he had returned to Minneapolis, tight-lipped and strangely jubilant.
“Oh, I was sort of fresh at first,” he told Frog Parker patronizingly, “but I got along fine—lightest man on the squad. You ought to go away to school, Froggy. It’s great stuff.”
Incident of the Well-Meaning Professor.
On the last night of his first term, Mr. Margotson, the senior master, sent word to study hall that Amory was to come to his room at nine. Amory suspected that advice was forthcoming, but he determined to be courteous, because this Mr. Margotson had been kindly disposed toward him.
His summoner received him gravely, and motioned him to a chair. He hemmed several times and looked consciously kind, as a man will when he knows he’s on delicate ground.
“Amory,” he began. “I’ve sent for you on a personal matter.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ve noticed you this year and I—I like you. I think you have in you the makings of a—a very good man.”
“Yes, sir,” Amory managed to articulate. He hated having people talk as if he were an admitted failure.
“But I’ve noticed,” continued the older man blindly, “that you’re not very popular with the boys.”
“No, sir.” Amory licked his lips.
“Ah—I thought you might not understand exactly what it was they—ah—objected to. I’m going to tell you, because I believe—ah—that when a boy knows his difficulties he’s better able to cope with them—to conform to what others expect of him.” He a-hemmed again with delicate reticence, and continued: “They seem to think that you’re—ah—rather too fresh——”
Amory could stand no more. He rose from his chair, scarcely controlling his voice when he spoke.
“I know—oh, don’t you s’pose I know.” His voice rose. “I know what they think; do you s’pose you have to tell me!” He paused. “I’m—I’ve got to go back now—hope I’m not rude——”
He left the room hurriedly. In the cool air outside, as he walked to his house, he exulted in his refusal to be helped.
“That damn old fool!” he cried wildly. “As if I didn’t know!”
He decided, however, that this was a good excuse not to go back to study hall that night, so, comfortably couched up in his room, he munched nabiscos and finished “The White Company.”
Incident of the Wonderful Girl.
There was a bright star in February. New York burst upon him on Washington’s Birthday with the brilliance of a long-anticipated event. His glimpse of it as a vivid whiteness against a deep-blue sky had left a picture of splendor that rivalled the dream cities in the Arabian Nights; but this time he saw it by electric light, and romance gleamed from the chariot-race sign on Broadway and from the women’s eyes at the Astor, where he and young Paskert from St. Regis’ had dinner. When they walked down the aisle of the theatre, greeted by the nervous twanging and discord of untuned violins and the sensuous, heavy fragrance of paint and powder, he moved in a sphere of epicurean delight. Everything enchanted him. The play was “The Little Millionaire,” with George M. Cohan, and there was one stunning young brunette who made him sit with brimming eyes in the ecstasy of watching her dance.
“Oh—you—wonderful girl,
What a wonderful girl you are—”
sang