His second admiration was a grey-haired, lean descendant of one of the oldest families in town, a certain Oliver Pruyd, whose hawk-beaked face habitually wore an ironic grin. He was supposed to correspond with the metropolitan newspapers, and his unofficial scholarship had achieved a certain subrosa reputation. But his gains in his vocation were obviously slender and it was not his scholarship that brought him distinction. Pruyd was the only known addict to the use of morphine of whom the community could boast. Osprey’s acquaintance with him had been casual. There was something sinister in Pruyd’s mocking expression and wrinkled, flavescent skin. Once, however, the younger man had achieved the brilliance of seeking him out in his small den over the pool and billiard hall, an indescribably neat and carefully arranged place, walled with books and piles of periodicals. Pruyd proved stimulating through three drinks, introducing many hints of literary sources and art lore hitherto strange to his companion. In the days of his family’s wealth he had ruined his usefulness by overlong haunting of the byways of Europe. Beginning with the fourth bourbon, however, the conversation descended to common levels, and the affair ended with their staggering down Broadway like any two other louts expelled from Steve Ball’s at the closing hour. The only other consolation was the college library. In its actual precincts he was often uncomfortable because he was critically inspected by elderly persons at the desk for his curious taste in books. This alternately intimidated and enraged him--and almost barred him from the use of the library. But from it he obtained Pater’s “Marius” and “Renaissance,” prints of Hogarth and Daumier and Michelangelo, “Tom Jones” and Balzac, Rousseau and Voltaire, stray bits of Wilde and Beardsley, and sprinklings of the French symbolists--shuddersome bombs in those days. The art class, one of the main objectives of his course (and the sop which his father had thrown him in urging him to take a well-rounded education before he settled down to his choice) was a puerile and primary bore after the first day, a repetition of the drawing of casts in charcoal, to which he had devoted two years at high school--with a prim sketch hour thrown in twice a week in the evening, the members of the class serving as models for fifteen minute studies. A few weeks after the conversation with Emmet Roget at Milton’s Pond, Potter was sitting with a full assemblage of his fraternity brothers at a breakfast of oatmeal swimming in blue milk, biscuits and rancid butter--which was all the country town could furnish for some curious reason--and pork chops well immersed in grease. The house manager that season was an economist, loudly cursed at every meal, but immensely appreciated at the end of the month when the pro-rated statements came around.