Thorn didn’t know and he didn’t care, but had Prescott handed him an appointment to an assistant professor’s chair, instead of having robbed him a little of what dignity he possessed, he would not have been so elated by half. Prescott continued to call him “Thorn” after that, but always with apparent effort,--as if aware that in doing it he was not living quite up to his principles. This trouble with his name might have served Thorn as an indication of what his position actually was in the tiny world he longed so much to be part of once more. But he was not a clever man where he himself was concerned. Little things hurt him constantly without opening his eyes. For instance, it rarely occurred to the fellows that the instructor might care to join them in any of their hastily planned expeditions to town after dinner. Not that he was ostracised; he was simply overlooked. When he did go to the theatre, he bought the tickets himself, and asked Prescott or Sears, or some of them, to go with him. The occasion invariably lacked the charm of spontaneity. When he invited any of them to dine with him in town, as he often did, they went, if they hadn’t anything else to do, and seemed to enjoy their dinner. But to Thorn these feasts were a series of disappointments. He always got up from the table with a sense of having failed in something. What? He didn’t know--he couldn’t have told. He was like a man who shoots carefully at nothing, and then feels badly because he hits it. He persisted in loitering along sunny lanes, and growing melancholy because they led nowhere. It was Sears Wolcott who took even the zest of anticipation out of Thorn’s little dinners in town, by saying to the graduate one evening,-- “What’s the point of going to the Victoria for dinner? It’s less trouble, and a damned sight livelier, to eat out here.” Sears had what Haydock called, “that disagreeable habit of hitting promiscuously from the shoulder.” The reaction on Thorn of all this was at last a dawning suspicion of his own unimportance. By the time the midyear examinations came, he felt somehow as if he were “losing ground;” he hadn’t reached the point yet of realising that he never had had any. He used to throw down his work in a fit of depression and consult his three-sided mirror apprehensively.