When he returned to his rooms, Joe and Regan were there. He sat down directly and told them the whole story, showing them her letter. "She went away--for my sake," he said. "I know it. Poor little devil. It's a letter I'll always keep." Solemnly, looking at the letter, he resolved to put this with the one, the first from Jean Story, and reverently he felt that the two had the right to be joined. "What's terrible about it," he said, talking out his soul, "is that there's so much good in them. And yet what can you do? They're human, they respond, you can't help pitying them--wanting to be decent, to help--and you can't. It's terrible to think that there are certain doors in life you open and close, that you must turn your back on human lives sometimes, that things can't be changed. Lord, but it's a terrible thing to realize." He stopped, and he heard Regan's voice, moved as he had never heard it, say: "That's my story--only _I_ married." Suddenly, as though realizing for the first time what he had said, he burst out: "Good God, I never meant to tell. See here, you men, that's sacred--you understand." And Dink and Joe, looking on his face, realized all at once why a certain gentler side of life was shut out to him, and why he had never gone to the Storys'. CHAPTER XXVII One result of Stover's sobering experience with Fanny Le Roy was that he met the problem of the senior elections with directness and honesty. What Brockhurst had said of the injurious effect of secrecy and ceremony on the imagination had always been with him. Yet in his desire to stand high in the eyes of Jean Story, to win the honors she prized, he had quibbled over the question. Now the glimpse he had had into the inscrutable verities of human tragedy had all at once lifted him above the importance of local standards, and left him with but one desire--to be true to himself. The tests that had come to him in his college life had brought with them a maturity of view beyond that of his fellows. Now that he seriously debated the question, he said to himself that he saw great evils in the system: that on the average intelligence this thraldom to formula and awe at the assumption of mystery had undeniably a narrowing effect, unworthy of a great university dedicated to liberty of thought and action. He saw that while certain individuals, such as Hungerford and Regan, laughed at the bugbear of secrecy, and went their way unconcerned, a great number, more impressionable, had been ruled from the beginning by fear alone. With the aims and purposes of Skull and Bones he was in thorough sympathy--their independence of judgment, their seeking out of men who had to contend with poverty, their desire to reward ambition and industry and character--but the more he freely acknowledged their influence for democracy and simplicity at Yale, the more he revolted at the unnecessary fetish of it all.