My new roommate’s full name was Lamar Scott Pender, and he came from Maristown, Kentucky, where he had been attending a small school called, I believe, the Kentucky Academic Institute. I remember his saying that they had but twenty-eight pupils and thinking that its name was utterly disproportionate to its importance. In age he was my senior by a year, being sixteen and two months, but Pug always maintained that I would impress persons as being older than Pender. I suppose that was because I had always viewed life rather more seriously than most fellows do. I think that gives one an appearance of being older than one really is, don’t you? Pender was much of a gentleman, both in looks and behavior. I had always supposed that southern fellows were dark, but Pender wasn’t. He had sort of chestnut colored hair and a rather fair skin and blue eyes. He explained this by not being born very far south, but I don’t believe he was right about that. He had a taste for athletics, which I had not, but he was not by any means the addict that some fellows were; Swanson for instance. He tried football that fall, but didn’t succeed very well, being dropped from the second team about the last of October. He took his rejection very cheerfully and joined the cross-country squad, and, I believe, did rather well in two or three runs that were held before Christmas vacation. He entered in my class, upper middle, but he had to work pretty hard to keep up. He confessed that Holman’s was quite a different school from the one he had been attending. I think he would have made better progress had he taken his studies more seriously, but he had what might be called a frivolous propensity and was always looking for fun. We got on very well together after we had become really acquainted, which was probably about the middle of October. Until that time I think both Pug and I sort of held him under observation, as you might put it. Friendship is very sacred and one should be careful in the awarding of it. I don’t think that Pender realized that we were doubtful about him. If he did he never let on. But he was like that. I mean, he never looked very deeply below the surface of things. He saw only the apparent. Lots of times when Pug and I would go off together without inviting him to come along he seemed not to notice it at all, and acted just as if he didn’t care. Even after we had accepted him he never became really one of us. By that I mean that our tastes and his were dissimilar and that he never came to care for the finer things of life, like Literature and the Fine Arts and Classical Music and Philosophical Thought. He was always an outsider, but Pug and I got so we were quite fond of him, being sorry for him at the same time on account of his limitations.