As he strolled back to his room with the sounds of their voices in his ears, but with no memory of what they had been saying, he wondered if, after all, they hadn’t from the very first bored him just a little; if his unhappiness--his sense of failure when he talked to young people--didn’t come from the fact that they commended themselves to his affections rather than to his intellect. Thorn was a vain man in a quiet way. Prescott’s final examination book certainly didn’t commend itself to his intellect. It was long, and conscientious, and quite incorrect from cover to cover. The instructor left it until the last. He almost missed his train in deciding upon its mark. THE CLASS DAY IDYL Of course there is no such thing as the “typical Harvard man,” although it interests--or irritates--people who didn’t go to Harvard to believe every now and then that they have discovered him. If a well-dressed youth with a broad A, and an abnormal ignorance of the life practical, appears in a Western town, the business man from whom he seeks employment, after sounding the profoundest depths of his incapacity, amuses the family circle at dinner by telling of the call he had from a “typical Harvard man.” If a girl sits out a dance with a fellow who doesn’t give her the look of a slightly bewildered cow when she slings a little Swinburne at him, but who lets fly the tail end of a Rossetti sonnet in return, closely followed by a gem or two purloined here and there from Henry James, she thinks she has met another of those “typical Harvard men.” The young American travelling abroad who displays a decent reticence when compatriots of whom he never has heard, “put their paws on his shoulders and lap his face,” is described in many terms--that of “the typical Harvard man” coming last. This strange, mythical being is all things to all men--who are not Harvard men; but it is worthy of note that in the various aspects in which he is apperceived, he manages to repeat certain distinguished traits that even the enemy is bound--often secretly--to admire. No one, for instance, marks as typical of Harvard, a man who is ill-dressed, or ill-bred; he is usually good looking. So if the typical Harvard man, like the sea-serpent, continues to agitate the provinces from time to time, one is thankful that whatever his disguise may be for the moment, he is always a distinctly presentable young person. Beverly Beverly of the graduating class was often thought by outsiders to be of the type to which most Harvard men belonged. He was a very well arranged young gentleman who wore glasses. He always seemed to have plenty of money; he lived on the ground floor of Beck Hall, and had a servant.