And Billy had the field. S. Timothy’s sent fifteen men to Harvard that year; he knew them all, of course, and roomed with the very fine one. They all flocked together at first, until the acquaintance of each equalled the fourteen others plus fourteen times the friends of every one of them--which is all one knows, and all one needs to know. The number--it included the nebular hypothesis of the next year’s Institute and a few more--kept Billy’s head wagging incessantly in and about Cambridge. Of all this throng Billy was probably interested least in the man with whom he roomed. John Rice was a constant and living reminder of S. Timothy’s; Billy detested S. Timothy’s. He used to tell John pleasantly, that he not only didn’t like the school or anything he had learned there, but that it had bored him extremely for six years, although he hadn’t perhaps realised it at the time. “Spend next Sunday with you up at School?” he would say, airily, to this frequent suggestion of John’s. “My dear fellow, how foolishness! My life-work consists just now in forgetting S. Timothy’s.” Then he would pull John’s hair, or, perhaps, shy harmless missiles at him from across the room; for he knew that John was abjectly grateful for any semi-affectionate demonstrations of this nature, and it amused Billy to be liked by people,--people for whom he didn’t particularly care. He didn’t care much for John; he found him solicitous rather than sympathetic. John was too contemplative--too “set”; he refused to accept freshman standards and go ahead accordingly. Billy, who managed, before he was through, to spread himself uncommonly thin over a considerable area, fancied that he thought his room-mate pitifully prudent. For when Billy entered college, he proceeded from the very first to expand in the largeness and fulness of his glorious new life. People said, afterwards, his development had been so slight and so artificial, in the stained-glass atmosphere of his imitation English “fitting” school, that it made up for lost time at a most astonishing rate when the boy became his own master. He was very much like a supersensitive photograph plate in the hands of a bungler. If you know what _it_ does on being plunged into the developing solution, you have an idea of Billy’s Freshman year.