Naturally enough, Hewitt’s sense of isolation was far less on these solitary rambles of his, than when he jostled elbows in crowded class-rooms with fellows who, he felt, were potentially his friends, at the same time that he was realising how utterly excluded he was from their schemes of life. Morbidness was foreign to a nature like his; and yet, as time went on, he had been forced to regard Cambridge as most satisfactory when deserted and asleep. It was only then that the forlorn feeling of being no essential part of his surroundings often left him; and although he recognised the weakness of strolling away from unpleasant truths, the altogether unlooked-for state of affairs at college had cowed him into temporary helplessness. That this furtive condition was temporary, even he himself was in a measure aware; one cannot but feel at college that after a certain time has passed, one’s fellows, in spite of the plasticity of youth, become, if not solid, at least viscous, in the moulds that have received them. There is an uneasy period of ebullition in which boys try very hard to enjoy the things that they do, in the absence of the self-poise that enables them to do what they eventually find they enjoy. Intimacies are formed and broken; habits are acquired and not broken; there is a weighing and a levelling, and at last, toward the end of one’s sophomore year, almost everybody has been made or marred or overlooked. It was an intuition of something of this kind that led Hewitt, in his more thoughtful moods, to realise that he was having his worst time now. The great, ill-assorted crowd that technically composed his “class” would shift and change and finally become, not satisfied, perhaps, with the various combinations it had evolved, but certainly used to them. After that, life at Harvard, Hewitt told himself, would be simplified for him; the time for identifying one’s self with the companions of one’s choice would have come and gone; he would find himself standing alone. His future development would not be just what he had expected; but there was peace in the thought that his position would be definite, unalterable, and then, after all, he would be standing, and not running away, as in the past year he had been so often tempted to do. Although anything but a student, he could even fancy himself ploughing doggedly in self-defence through an incredible number of courses in history, or some such subject, and at the end pleasing his family with two or three Latin words of a laudatory nature on his degree. Hewitt was too thinking and too just a person not to have frequently contrasted his own condition with that of fellows one occasionally heard about, who starved their way through college on sums that would have made scarcely an impression on his room-rent; their persistent “sandiness” compelled his admiration; more than once he had given substantial expression to it. But it was at best a very theoretical sort of consolation that came from