That evening “the crowd,” as our friends called themselves in their modest schoolboy way, including Kit, Tony, Jimmie Lawrence, Teddy Lansing and Tack Turner, went to the Inn and spent a merry evening under Mrs. Wilson’s indulgent chaperonage. There were other parties there, including the parents and sisters and cousins and an occasional aunt of various boys; a gathering of the clans loyal to Deal; a score or so of Old Boys, mostly from Kingsbridge, back for the game, who had overflowed from the crowded school into the Inn. In the proud consciousness of their undoubted superiority as college men, the Old Boys somewhat cast their younger brethren in the shade, and treated them with patronizing airs, asking them occasional questions in a patriarchal manner. Tony alone amongst his companions seemed to shine that evening. There flashed into prominence, to their first observation, in his manner, his appearance even, something of that charm which was more and more making him a favorite, and which, though his schoolfellows never analyzed it, was to be cordially recognized later on. It would have been hard to say in just what Tony’s charm lay, perhaps it was that a certain serious sweetness of disposition, the finer traits of his character, for the most part unnoticed in the helter-skelter rough-and-readiness of school life, were emerging. Women, who are always quicker than men to estimate a personality, to be conscious of its finer as well as its more obvious strains, felt this at once in Tony. He was a success with Mrs. Wilson and the girls. His own friends, intimate with him in all the openness and yet sometimes quite misleading circumstances of everyday existence, who ordinarily thought of him merely as a boon companion, a genial playmate, gifted with a nice sense of honor but ready for a lark and a risk with the most reckless, were a little surprised at the evident impression he made not only on Mrs. Wilson, but on Betty and Barbara Worthington. His friends saw in him that night a facility despite his modesty, a social poise untempered by self-consciousness, that more distinctly than ever before singled him out as their natural leader. Kit indeed, felt several miserable pangs of jealousy, as he noted Barbara’s quick response to Tony’s gayety, and her unconcealed desire to remain part of the group of which Tony was in some sense the center rather than wander off with him for the too obvious pleasure of a tête-à-tête. But Kit himself was too whole-souled, too merry of nature, to sulk, and save for an occasional growl to which no one paid attention, before the evening was over, he was enjoying Tony as he had never enjoyed him before, wondering at the quick development of this social side of his character which had been unobserved.