There was something exquisitely intelligible to the graduate in the very vagueness of the boy’s pronoun. “They,”--he too, in the early forlornness of his college life, had been eagerly aware of them,--the great creatures, who, for some reason or other (not always a transparent one), seemed to emerge with such enviable distinction from the vast mediocrity of the crowd; “They” who put on astonishing black coats and spent Sunday afternoon in town; “They” who so frequently wore little crimson usher’s badges at the games, and bowed to so many of the attractive people they showed to their seats; “They” who, fine shouldered and brown from rowing on the crews, seemed to endure their education with such splendid listlessness; “They” whom he had so often heard rattling into the suburban stillness of Cambridge just before dawn, from some fine dance in town. How unmistakable they were in the class-room, at a football game, the theatre,--everywhere; how instinctively they seemed to know one another, and how inevitably they came to be felt in every class as something, if not exactly apart, at least aloof. Curtiss stared musingly at the fire a moment, and smiled as he recalled the various trivial circumstances that, in his own case, gradually, and with none of the excitement of a conscious transition, had brought about the substitution of a perfectly natural, matter-of-fact “We,” for the once tacitly understood but exasperating “They.” For a moment he thought of asking Hewitt to explain himself; he had a freakish desire to see the fellow flounder in the effort to be clear, without becoming pitifully transparent; however, he thought better of it, and only answered with some impatience,--