John Rice--somehow he was never called “Jack”--and Billy Ware roomed together, it was said, because their mothers were congenial. These ladies certainly had, in common, the bond of sweet stupidity, or they never would have put into practice the ideal arrangement of having their sons share the same apartment. Rice was always, and with justice, spoken of as “a very fine man.” He was well put together and fine looking. His sense of duty was fine, also his sense of honour. He possessed a fine lot of commonplace ideas about many things, and carried with him an air of fine, if indefinite, purpose. On the whole, Billy considered him uninteresting. Billy, on the other hand, was fatally gifted in his ability to please everybody. Other things being satisfactory, personal appearance doesn’t weigh heavily in the balance of undergraduate judgment; it was not Billy’s extremely pretty and well cared for exterior that compelled fellows to take him into account in their preliminary survey of the Freshman Class; although that may have helped, just at first. People who liked the plasticity of his quick smile and the restlessness of his black eyebrows--there was something very un-Anglo-Saxon in their facial importance--thought he had “an expressive face.” But what it expressed, if anything, no man undertook to say. Hemenway, who drew for the “Lampoon,” said it was a sketch, not a face,--the sketch of a painter who didn’t take art seriously. Neither was it cleverness that made fellows who met Ware remember him favourably, if they happened to be upper classmen, and glad of a subsequent occasion that threw them in his way, if they were his own classmates. For Billy had none of the talents of which parlour tricks are made. In the presence of older boys, he instinctively knew the number and kind of remarks that gain for a freshman the negative distinction of being “able to talk enough.” With his contemporaries, he talked a great deal--almost up to the line that separated him from youths who chatter. But except for a whimsical manner of attack, and his consistent frivolity of tone in regard to almost everything, his conversation was unimportant. What he did possess, to a rather extraordinary degree, was that which, if given the field, is more magical among one’s fellows at college than brains, manners, looks, or money,--that which is described only as “the indescribable something.”