He lived in Beck rather than in Claverly, because, for some reason or other, Beck is not annually overrun by a crowd of sporty freshmen just released from highchurch fitting-schools. Furthermore, although surrounded in Beck by fellow-students whom he felt it possible to know, he didn’t happen to know any of them more intimately than a polite nod of the head would imply. So when he retired to his own room he was spared the nocturnal visitations and talk-to-deaths of a more populous building. Beverly was intelligent, reserved, and “set in his ways.” He had been in a great many places, and had met a great many people. By the end of his senior year he preferred to spend his time in doing nothing at all, rather than in doing something that didn’t interest him exceedingly. As he had gone to Harvard, people said he was a typical product of that institution. They couldn’t have said this if his father had seen fit to send him to a business college to learn how to audit accounts, and make an American eagle with a fist full of thunderbolts in two penstrokes. But Beverly would have been very much the same sort of person after all, only perhaps not as agreeable as he actually was. Early in his college career, Beverly had identified himself with the few fellows he cared to know. Since then, his little circle of intimate friends had, if anything, become smaller. When Class Day--his Class Day--began to be talked about, Beverly, as a matter of course, was asked to spread at Beck. His decision not to spread there--nor anywhere--was as much a matter of course. He didn’t enjoy Class Day, he said; it was always unbearably warm; it was impossible on that day to procure nourishment that wasn’t fluid or semi-fluid,--punch, chicken-salad, or icecream; and the vast armies of women, from Heaven knows where, who came early and stayed until they were put out, managed to kill the sentiment of the day for him, he said, even as they exterminated the grass in the College Yard. “I sha’n’t even be in Cambridge,” Beverly declared at breakfast, the morning before the great day. “You really ought to have spread, you know,” said Billy Fields. “It’s the only way we have of being nice to people in town who’ve been nice to us.” “You forget that Bevy considers himself perfectly square with everybody. He went to their entertainments,” said Haydock. “The truth of the matter is, Bevy’s afraid somebody will propose to him, and he is too polite to refuse. Those Boston girls are so impulsive!” suggested Wynne. “Maybe he wouldn’t look well in a cap and gown,” added another. “It’s foolish not to go to Class Day,” said Prescott, for whom the universe was conveniently divided into things that were “foolish” and things that weren’t. “He’s afraid that if he stays, he might be bored,” chimed in Haydock, again. “Somebody might ask him whether college men didn’t have a ‘perfectly lovely time,’ and which building Austin Hall was. Of course he doesn’t know.”