College stories, American; Princeton (N.J.) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Princeton University -- Fiction
Here he settled down to the methodical poler habits he was intended
for, and when the next catalogue was issued his mother and sister
pointed out to the minister's wife the name of "Horatio B. Stacy, New
Jersey," in the small group of names called "First Group," and said,
"We knew he would do it." In his sophomore year he did it again and
won a prize or two besides and became a minor light in the Cliosophic
Society, and by this time he held in that Hall an office, the name of
which was a secret, and could not be divulged even to his sister
Fannie. He studied for high marks and was called a "greasy poler." But
he got the high marks.
You must not think he had no friends. He made some firm ones. About
these he could write home to his sister Fannie, telling what
magnificent characters some of them were. Often of a Saturday night,
if he had no essays to write or debates to prepare, he slipped off his
eye-shades and pattered across the campus to his friends' rooms and
knocked gently and said, "How do?" and conversed for an hour on the
difficulty of taking notes when your neighbor is borrowing your knife,
or about the elective courses for the next term. And down at the club
they had great horse calling each other "Blamed Neo-Platonists" and
"Doggoned Transcendentalists." Nor was it all shop. One of them
thought himself in love. It was Stacy that used to wink at the others
and bob his head and say, "I know some one who got a letter to-day."
They had great fun at the club.
By reason of his freshman year's disgust he remained innocent, which
was right, and ignorant, which was wrong, of much that he might have
experienced, and he bade fair to graduate a typical poler with a bad
breath and an eye on Commencement stage and special honors. Sometimes,
to be sure, dark questions arose in his mind, strange, shameful
yearnings that caused him to read whole pages without taking in a word
of it. But then, all polers have wild moments when they feel that they
would rather play on the team than win the Stinnecke Scholarship, so
Stacy should not have been distressed.
But sometimes it seemed to him that even those classmates whom he knew
only slightly and did not understand at all, those fellows who seemed
to do nothing but loaf about the campus all day and sing and shout at
night, while he was running his hands through his hair and his eyes
through Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," they, it seemed to him, were
getting a poetry out of college life that he was missing. "But never
mind," he would say to himself. "They will regret it some day. They
will wish they had done as I am doing, instead of wasting golden
opportunities which come but once and which glide by like ships upon
the sea of life." Then he would pull his hair and start at the top of
the page again. It is better to have First Group than the Glee Club.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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