“Be honest with me, Curtiss.” Hewitt spoke in the distinct, simple tones that as a rule accompany words one hesitates to trifle with. “You’ve gone through the whole damn thing yourself, and got more out of it--not more than you deserve, of course, but more than most men get; you knew everybody and belonged to--to--” Hewitt hesitated a moment; any single college institution--social, athletic, or intellectual--did not in itself forcibly appeal to him; there was something petty in particularising. “You belonged to--to everything, when you were in college,” he finally said; “how was it done--how is it done every day? I see it going on around me all the time; but I can’t touch it in any way,--it never comes near enough, if you know what I mean; and what I can’t explain to myself is that I don’t see why it should come any nearer to me,--only, I want it to.” The manner in which Horace blurted out the last few words was an epitome of the situation; their confession of keen longing to know and be known in his class had gathered intensity with the growing suspicion that certain conditions of the place--conditions he felt rather than understood--were every day making the realisation of his desire for activity, acquaintances, friendship, more impossible. His great common sense--in Hewitt the quality amounted to a sort of prosaic talent--would always preclude his degenerating into one of the impotently rebellious; it had kept him free from the slightest tinge of bitterness toward any one, but it had not made his interminable, solitary walks up Brattle Street (there was apparently no other walk to take in Cambridge) less interminable; it had enlivened none of the stolid evenings in his rooms which, with a necessary amount of study, a chapter or two from some book he did not much care about, and a bottle of beer, always came to an end somehow or other in spite of themselves; it had not invested stupid theatres with interest, nor mediocre athletics with excitement. Common sense, the prevailing trait of Hewitt’s character, that induced the middle-aged to consider him “singularly well balanced for a young man,” was quite powerless to dispel the desperate loneliness of his sophomore year. His common sense was a coat of mail that defied sabre thrusts, perhaps, but let in the rain.