He had done it hard because he did everything hard. It had lasted several days and ended in a hospital in West Philadelphia, where he had three stitches put in his forehead. Now he was back in his old room in West College, with a pipe in his mouth, drumming on the arms of his chair and staring straight at his feet, which were upon the roller-top desk. Dark rings were under his eyes and he told himself that he had had a good time. He was thinking that it was quite a storybook coincidence that they should have come together, those two letters. They were so different and yet so much the complement of each other. The first was from his father. He had torn it open with his pen, as he would any other letter, and though he saw that it was several pages in length and knew intuitively that it would not be like any other letter he had ever read, he had deliberately rolled up the envelope to get a light for his pipe from the fire, and he had stretched out in the chair again as he was before, with his legs sprawled out in front and elbows resting on the arms, holding the letter before his face. Then he had commenced to smoke very hard, and presently stopped rocking back and forth as he read the words written in that clear, even hand, without a flourish or a superfluous mark, words that had caused him to gnaw the mouth-piece of his pipe as they burned their way into him. And all the while he pictured to himself a tall figure in a smoking-jacket trimmed with white braid sitting up straight and rigid at his desk in the corner of the cosey inner room of the office in William Street, and recalled how once, when an absconding clerk had left a temporary cloud on the name of the firm, the old, steely eyes had flashed under the lowering brows as the old gentleman had taken his seat at the breakfast-table, where he ate nothing. The letter sounded very like the governor. There was no mistaking its meaning. It was a succinct and comprehensive report of dissatisfaction at the younger Lawrence's methods, with a list of debts of filial affection and memoranda of overdraws on parental patience covering the last three years, and accompanied by a brief prospectus for the unpromising future. It was the sort of a letter he would have fancied a stately old gentleman like his father that was proud of his name writing to a son like himself that had disgraced it. Only it would have been just as well, Lawrence thought, to have omitted that part of the letter. He was quite willing to admit most of the hard things his father said of him because they were facts, but this about dishonorable cowardice and the family name was going a little too far, and he told himself that he did not quite see how he could stand that from anyone. And he sat up straight and pressed hard on the arms of his chair and looked very like the indignant old Colonel who had written the words.