Then unknown invisible blocks, miles of them, his head clearing, and he made grave announcement to a Jim Lefferts who suddenly seemed to be with him: “I gotta lick that fellow.” “All right, all _right_. You might as well go find a nice little fight and get it out of your system!” Elmer was astonished; he was grieved. His mouth hung open and he drooled with sorrow. But still, he was to be allowed one charming fight, and he revived as he staggered industriously in search of it. Oh, he exulted, it was a great party. For the first time in weeks he was relieved from the boredom of Terwillinger College. II Elmer Gantry, best known to classmates as Hell-cat, had, this autumn of 1902, been football captain and led the best team Terwillinger College had known in ten years. They had won the championship of the East-middle Kansas Conference, which consisted of ten denominational colleges, all of them with buildings and presidents and chapel services and yells and colors and a standard of scholarship equal to the best high-schools. But since the last night of the football season, with the glorious bonfire in which the young gentlemen had burned up nine tar barrels, the sign of the Jew tailor, and the president’s tabby-cat, Elmer had been tortured by boredom. He regarded basket-ball and gymnasium antics as light-minded for a football gladiator. When he had come to college, he had supposed he would pick up learnings of cash-value to a lawyer or doctor or insurance man—he had not known which he would become, and in his senior year, aged twenty-two this November, he still was doubtful. But this belief he found fallacious. What good would it be in the courtroom, or at the operating table, to understand trigonometry, or to know (as last spring, up to the examination on European History, he remembered having known) the date of Charlemagne? How much cash would it bring in to quote all that stuff—what the dickens was it now?—all that rot about “The world is too much around us, early and soon” from that old fool Wordsworth? Punk, that’s what it was. Better be out in business. But still, if his mother claimed she was doing so well with her millinery business and wanted him to be a college graduate, he’d stick by it. Lot easier than pitching hay or carrying two-by-fours anyway. Despite his invaluable voice, Elmer had not gone out for debating, because of the irritating library-grinding, nor had he taken to prayer and moral eloquence in the Y. M. C. A., for with all the force of his simple and valiant nature he detested piety and admired drunkenness and profanity.