“Don’t repeat things like that about Sears, Johnny, even if you like to believe them,” said Haydock, simply. Haydock always seemed a little older--less haphazard in his words--than his contemporaries, and never so much so as when repressing what had once been a temper of the most flaming kind. Ellis--limited, conscientious, uncompromising--created countless occasions for such repression. He was a pale tissue of all the virtues. His sobriety was the kind that drove men to the gutter; his chastity lowered temperatures. Once at a small dinner he inadvertently got drunk and became so austere that the fellows went home. To-night, in running down a member of the club at the club, he had more than irritated Haydock. And then--which in this instance was to the point--the member had been Wolcott. As a matter of fact, Haydock liked Wolcott as he liked very few people. But even if one wasn’t fond of The Magnificent One, he thought, there were so many people all over the college who spent a generous portion of their time in cursing him,--men to whom “Sears Wolcott” was the eponym of snob, and purse-proud arrogance,--that in not sticking up for him, or, at least, in not knowing what was really fine in him, one missed a rare chance of judging by standards other than those of Thomas, Richard, and Henry. Wolcott was a snob, of course; but then he never denied the fact,--he even volunteered the information at times. And there’s hope for that kind of a snob, thought Haydock. The club--which had a characteristic expression for almost every hour of the day--was beginning to lose what Haydock always thought of as its “just-after-dinner look.” The men had finished their coffee; some of them strolled off to their rooms to grind; others hurried in town to the theatre; two were playing cards rather solemnly in a corner; on the divan, a worn-out athlete had fallen asleep over a comic paper. Haydock finished his cigar and went across to his room in Claverly. At ten o’clock,--Wolcott’s bedtime when in training,--Haydock lit a pipe and knocked on The Magnificent One’s door at the other end of the long corridor. His coming at that hour was such a matter of course, that the door had been left hospitably unlatched as usual. “How was the rowing to-day?” he asked. The question, also, was a matter of course. “Damned hard work!” Wolcott was leisurely undressing and dropping his clothes wherever he happened to be when they came off. “About ten racing starts, then down to the Basin and up to the Brighton abattoir and back. I’m tired.” “And just a dash peevish, I believe.” Haydock sat down on the floor, and lit the shavings and kindling wood in the fireplace. Wolcott’s rooms were always as fresh and cold as the weather permitted.