"It would do you men good to read the _Memorial Biographies_," Gray continued, now thoroughly aroused, and paying no attention to the side remarks. "They ought to be part of the prescribed work for a degree." "Yes, but as Hudson says, you couldn't do that if you were a biographee," reasoned Dane Austin, the law-school man, taking a hand in the baiting. "It would be perfectly disgusting to hear you fellows talk this way," Gray declared, "if one didn't know that it was all affectation. I am not sure that that fact does not make it worse. You all really feel just as I do, but you are afraid to say so." "Another appalling case of Harvard indifference," observed Stoughton. "The modern dilettante has no noble desire for red war." "He likes to make people believe that he has no noble desire for anything, and he has a morbid fear of being a hypocrite. As a matter of fact, you are all of you the worst kind of hypocrites, for you try to appear worse than you are." "Oh, dear, no," Rattleton protested, lazily, "that would be too hard work for any of this crowd--except me." "A war would be a good thing to stir you up. I almost wish the war times would come again," exclaimed Gray, hotly. "Now you are getting right down to work," laughed Hudson. "What a rise we are getting out of our earnest young man to-night." "You let your feelings get away with you, Gray," added Holworthy. "I don't believe it was all glory and enthusiasm in those days. You forget there was another side to it. For instance, Jack Randolph's governor was not cheered out of the Yard when _he_ left for the war." "Yes, there _was_ another side to it," came a voice from the other end of the room, and a big arm-chair, that had been facing the fire with its back to the knot of men, was pushed around so as show its occupant. He was evidently one of that wide class known to the undergraduate as the "Old Grads." An old grad. attains his title as soon as he ceases to be a very young grad.; there is no transition degree. In this case he seemed about middle aged, perhaps fifty, with hair turning gray, and a rather deeply marked brown face. The latter was just then a little flushed, and had the expression often seen on a face that has just been looking a long time into a fire and a long way through it.