Even before Wolcott’s bundle had enabled McGaw to blossom, like the season, into fine raiment, his whole appearance had undergone a subtle, indescribable change. Perhaps it was a recently acquired firmness of gait as he swung through the Yard to a lecture, or up the steps of Claverly to Sears’s room. Hitherto he had hated the approach to Claverly; there usually were men going in or coming out, who looked at him as they passed. Once he had found a whole group of them seated on the steps, and had walked twice round the block, rather than brush through to the door. Or it may have been the spiritual radiance that comes of good food and plenty of it, money in your pocket, and peace in your mind. At any rate, McGaw’s expression, whether it walked at you, or looked at you, or smiled at you, had, of late, become the outward and visible sign of a great inward happiness. Almost every minute of his day was dedicated to his work; yet he felt as if he were having for the first time leisure in which to breathe. By no means the least exquisite of his satisfactions was his first purchase of something unnecessary, a luxury, an extravagance; he bought one evening, in a dim musty corner of a Brattle Square bookstall, a second-hand copy of some Latin hymns for twenty cents. The demi-god who had caused such things to be--Barrows had spoken vaguely of “a friend”--had become to McGaw the occasion of the sun’s rising and the stars’ shining; through him, the earth revolved, and the college endured. McGaw was very religious; every night he prayed fervently for the man who was befriending him. To-day, when he left his room to walk down to Claverly, he had the uplifting glow of self-respect and good-will to men whose secret only barbers and tailors seem to know. Perhaps, just at first, he felt even more like a white elephant than one ordinarily does on getting into a fresh suit of grey, after wearing black for many months. But the sensation, coming as it did from the knowledge that he was conspicuously better, rather than worse dressed than most people, was not altogether an unpleasant one to McGaw. Wolcott’s back was turned when he arrived. This fact made what followed even more unfortunate than it would have been had the somewhat astounding truth burst on Sears at the moment the tutor came into the room. For it enabled Wolcott to say, in his natural, off-hand tones, without looking away from his desk: