When Sears got up the next morning, he “puttered among dishes in his bedroom,”--a thing he usually detested,--instead of going down to the tank for a swim. He had stopped his morning plunge of late, because, since he had begun to get up early, he almost always met Ellis in the tank. Ellis was an offensively clean person; he bathed with much unnecessary splashing, and changed his shirt with a flourish of trumpets. His noisy ablutions got on Wolcott’s nerves. To-day the peacefulness of Sears’s own room, and the indescribable beauty of the College Yard,--spring in Cambridge comes to the Yard first,--as he walked to and from breakfast, combined to put him in one of his best moods,--one which expressed itself in a slow exuberance of spirits, a persistent, obstinate bantering of everybody and everything that, although far removed from ill-humour, was not yet mirth. When at nine o’clock there was a knock on his door, Sears, instead of saying, “Come in,” called out the long, unspellable “Ay-y-y-y-y,” one hears so many times a day around college; when he looked up and saw McGaw, the tutor, standing in the doorway, his manner did not change. “Hello!--sorry to see you!” he said, without rising. “I don’t feel much like it this morning.” McGaw fingered his notebook uneasily. “But come in, anyhow--I suppose I have to,” added Wolcott, noticing with a smile that the tutor thought he had been dismissed. “Don’t sit there; it’s a rotten sofa. Sit over by the window and smoke.” “I don’t smoke, thank you,” said McGaw, sitting down where he had been told to. “What’s the matter; are you in training?” Let it be said, to Wolcott’s credit, that the irony of his question was unconscious, and, to his discredit, that the chuckle with which he greeted his own words as soon as their absurdity dawned on him was pointed and uncontrolled. He had asked McGaw if he was in training, because the question naturally followed a refusal to drink or smoke; its inappropriateness flashed upon him afterwards. Nothing short of incongruity, striking, absolute, could make Sears laugh as he was laughing now. McGaw in training! That hatchet-faced, slant-shouldered, chestless, leggy, comic valentine whose neck and wrists and ankles refused to desist where his clothes left off,--in training! Sears twisted half-way round that he might have a better look at the tutor, and, throwing his legs over the arm of his huge leather chair, he shook with amusement. Then a slow, disconcerting wave of regret for what he had done crept over him; it made him warm, and pricked painfully among the roots of his hair. It left him all at once with nothing to say. McGaw opened his note-book and stared at it blindly. Two brilliant spots of pink tipped his high cheek-bones. “Let’s begin,” said Wolcott, gruffly. “How much do you know of the subject?” asked McGaw, in a voice that might have come from an automaton. “Nothing.” “Do you know any Latin?” “Damned little!”