But when he had summoned up enough courage to drop in at the club late one evening, he found every one’s manner toward him pretty much as it always had been; yet he could tell instinctively, as he sat there, who had and who hadn’t heard Prescott’s little anecdote. Wolcott knew; he called Thorn, “Marcus,” with unnecessary gusto, and once or twice laughed his peculiarly irritating laugh when there was nothing, as far as Thorn could see, to laugh at. Haydock knew; Thorn winced under the cool speculative stare of the senior’s grey eyes. Wynne knew; although Thorn had no more specific reason for believing so, than that the boy seemed rather more formidably bespectacled than usual. Several of the younger fellows also knew; Thorn knew that they knew; he couldn’t stand it. When the front door slammed after him on his way back to his room, he told himself that, as far as he was concerned, it had slammed for the last time. He was very nearly right. He would have had to be a pachyderm compared to which the “blood sweating behemoth of Holy Writ” is a mere satin-skinned invalid, in order to have brazened out the rest of the year on the old basis. He couldn’t go to the club and converse on base-ball and the “musical glasses,” knowing that the fellows with whom he was talking were probably weighing the pros and cons of taking his courses next year, and getting creditable marks in them, without doing a stroke of work. He couldn’t face that “rough justice of boys” that would sanction the fellows making use of him, and considering him a pretty poor thing, at the same time. So he stayed away; he didn’t go near the place through March and April and May. When his work didn’t call him elsewhere, he stayed in his room and attempted to live the life of a scholar,--an existence for which he was in every conceivable way unfitted. For a time he studied hard out of books; but the most profitable knowledge he acquired in his solitude was the great deal he learned about himself. He tried to write. He had always thought it in him to “write something,” if he ever should find the necessary leisure. But the play he began amounted to no more than a harmless pretext for discoursing in a disillusioned strain on Life and Art in the many letters he wrote to people he had known abroad,--people, for whom, all at once, he conceived a feeling of intimacy that no doubt surprised them when they received his letters. His volume of essays was never actually written, but the fact that he was hard at work on it served well as an answer to:-- “Why the devil don’t we ever see you at the club nowadays?”