"This is what I want to ask of you: Tell me--you've had your little taste of it now, the glamour is rubbed off, you find there is not quite so much in it as you thought--tell me honestly, my boy, do you believe it pays? Don't you think that one morning like this, with a head such as you have now, and the thoughts inside of it, with a sight of those photographs over there on the bureau, is enough to counterbalance all the fun there is in a month of last nights?" To this long speech the freshman made no reply, because Lawrence did not say a word of it aloud. In fact most of those grand-stand remarks were not thought out until late that night in bed, while rolling over trying to get to sleep. He would not have voiced them to the freshman anyway. Of course not. It certainly was "not strictly his business" to walk into the room of a nodding acquaintance and call him a fool in long sentences. Lawrence knew that. And it would have been even worse taste to open up his own bosom and drag out his own private worries and dangle them before the eyes of another. It is only in certain short stories that such absurdities are performed by reserved young men. Lawrence was not that kind of a fool. The Sunday morning conversation ran something like this, while Lawrence tied and untied the freshman's four-in-hand neck-tie about the foot-post of the bed: "The Fifty-seventh Street Harrisons? Yes, very well. Were they down there?... Is that so?--to Clint Van Brunt? But I don't like her so well as her sister. Grace is a smooth dancer though.... At Sherry's last winter...." And similar nonsense until the conversation swung round to the prospects of the baseball team, which had recently begun practice in the cage. Then they both woke up and said something. And throughout it all the freshman was wondering why the mighty senior honored him with a visit, and longing for a drink of very cold water. Lawrence told himself that this call was merely to break the ice. You couldn't expect him to talk about such serious things when they were hardly acquainted. Could you? He went again within a few days. He thought he ought to strike while the iron was hot. It was in the evening this time, and the freshman was brighter and better looking. Lawrence liked him more than ever, only he wished that he would not be quite so deferential toward him. Also he greatly wished that he would not consider it necessary to tack those superfluous words to his remarks. It bothered him. They seemed to come out of the refined mouth side wise. Sometimes they stuck, as it were, and hung there while Lawrence shivered. And the more obvious Lawrence made it that he did not consider such emphasis essential to his own observations, the more frequently did Darnell drag it in. This was to show the senior that he need not refrain on his account. This time Lawrence remained until midnight. They did not once mention the people they both knew in town. They talked about tramping in the Harz Mountains.