"You know I've got into such a serious point of view! I don't quite know how it happened. Sometimes it seems to me I'm missing all the fun of college life." He made a gesture toward the billiard room. "Even fellows like McNab, good for nothing, jovial little loafers, according to Yale standards, do seem to be getting something wonderful out of these years. I don't. It's been all work or fighting." "That's because they are going different ways in life than you are," she said quickly. "Tell me more about this new organization. It seems a big idea. Whom will you take in?" She added suddenly: "Take charge yourself, do it all yourself. It's just what you should do." He was too much interested in the expounding of the idea to notice the solicitude she showed him. After a while the conversation drifted to other topics. He spoke of the summer. "Joe wants me to go on a cruise, and Bob wants me to run up to your camp for a visit, but I've about decided to do neither." She looked up. "Why not?" "I am going with Regan for the summer--slumming it, I suppose some would call it; Tom calls it getting real education. We're going down to work among men who work, to know something of what they think and want--and what they think of us. It appeals to me tremendously. I want to have an all-around point of view. There are so many opportunities coming now, and I want to grasp them all--learn all I can. What do you think?" "It is a splendid idea, just the thing for you now. It will broaden you," she said, with a determined bob of her head. "Why doesn't Bob ever bring Regan around? He sounds interesting." "Don't know--he sticks by himself. You can't move him. Bob's told you about the four of us rooming together?" "Yes." "I wonder--" "What?" she asked as he stopped. "Did you suggest to Bob what he said to me this afternoon?" he said point blank. She looked at him troubled and undecided, and he suddenly guessed the reason. "Oh, won't you trust me enough to tell me," he said boyishly, "if you did?" She looked into his eyes a moment longer. "He was afraid you wouldn't like it," she said simply. "Yes, I told him to go." A dozen things rushed to his lips, and he said nothing. Perhaps she liked his silence better than anything he could have said, for she added: "You will do the big things now, won't you? You see, I want to see you at your biggest." When he went home that night, he seemed to walk on air. He had taken no advantage of her friendship, tempted almost beyond his powers as he had been by the kindness in her voice and her direct appeal. He had to tell some one, not of the interest he felt she had shown him, but of his own complete adoration and supreme consecration. So he hauled Hungerford up to his room, who received the information as to Stover's state of mind with gratifying surprise, as though it were the most incredible, mystifying, and incomprehensible bit of news. CHAPTER XXIII