"Want time to myself. I've never had it, and now I'm going to get it." Le Baron of the machine did not understand him, and he did not explain. Stover was essentially a man of action and not a thinker. He did not reason things out for himself, but when he became convinced he acted. So, when he had thought over Brockhurst's theories and admitted that he was not independent, he determined at once to be so. He began zealously, turning his back on his own society crowd, to seek out the members of his class whom he did not know, resolved that his horizon should be of the freest. For the first time he began to reason on what others said to him. He went often to Swazey's rooms, and Regan's, which were centers of discussion. Some of the types that drifted in were incongruous, bizarre, flotsam and jetsam of the class; but in each, patiently resolved, he found something to stir the imagination; and when, under Regan's quickening influence, he stopped to consider what life in the future would mean to them, he began to understand what his friend, the invincible democrat, meant by the inspiring opportunity of college--the vision of a great country that lay on the lips of the men he had only to seek out. Dink was of too direct a nature and also too confident in the strength of his position to consider the effect of his sudden pilgrimage to what was called the "outsiders." Swazey and Pike, at his invitation, took to dropping into his room and working out their lessons with him. Quite unconsciously, he found himself constantly in public companionship with them and other newly discovered types who interested him. About two weeks after this new life had begun, Le Baron stopped him one day, with a little solicitous frown, saying: "Look here, Dink, aren't you cutting loose from your own crowd a good deal?" "Why, yes, I guess I am," Dink announced, quite unconsciously. "I wouldn't get identified too much with--well, with some of the fellows you've taken up." Stover smiled, and went his way undisturbed. For the first time he felt his superiority over Le Baron. Le Baron could not know what he knew--that it was just these new acquaintances who had waked him up out of his torpor and made a thinking being of him. Others in his class, mistaking his motives, began to twit him: "I say, Dink, what are you out for?" "Running for something?" "Getting into politics?" "Junior Prom, eh?" He turned the jests aside with jests as ready, quite unaware that in his own crowd he was arousing a little antagonism; for he was developing in such deep lines that he did not perceive vexing details. All at once he remembered that it had been over a fortnight since he had called at the Storys' and he ran over one afternoon about four o'clock, expecting to stay for dinner; for the Judge kept open house to the friends of his son, and Stover had readily availed himself of the privilege to become intimate.