Sylvia was looking at him, a trifle worried. “Frank,” she said, “suppose you go through life finding fault with everything in that fashion?” “I don’t know,” he replied. “But I shall always fight a wrong when I see one. Wait till you’ve been here a while, and you’ll see about this!” “I ought to have come before,” she said; “I could have solved so many problems for you. It’s the same everywhere in life—those who are out rail at those who are in, but when you hear both sides, you see the matter differently. I’ve a grudge against you, Frank—you misrepresented things. You told me they had abolished the Fraternity system here, and I didn’t know about the clubs, and so I permitted you to be a ‘goat.’” “They call it a ‘rough-neck’ here,” he corrected. “Well, a ‘rough-neck.’ Anyway, I let you take a back seat. And just as if you didn’t have ability——” “Ability!” Frank exclaimed. Then, checking himself, he went on gently to explain the social system he had found at Harvard. In the Southern colleges, ability and good breeding might still get a poor man recognition. But the clubs here were run by a little group of Boston and New York society men, who had been kept in a “set” from the day they were born. They went to kindergarten together, to dancing school together—their sisters had private sewing circles, instead of those at church. They had their semi-private dormitories on Auburn Street—one might come with a string of automobiles and a stud of polo ponies, but he would find that his money would not rent one of those places unless the crowd had given its O. K. They roomed apart, they ate and drank apart, and the men in their own class never even met them. Sylvia listened in bewilderment. “Surely, Frank,” she exclaimed, “there must be some friendliness——” He smiled. “Just as I said, honey—you’re judging by the South. We’ve snobbery enough there, God knows—but some of us are kind-hearted. You can’t imagine things up here—how cold and formal people are. They have their millions of dollars and the social position this gives them; they are jealous of those who have more and suspicious of those who have less—and they’ve been that way for so long that every plain human feeling is dead in them. Take a man like Douglas van Tuiver, for example. You’ve heard of him, I suppose?” “I’ve heard of the van Tuivers, of course.” “Well, Douglas is our bright particular social star just now. He’s inherited from three estates already—the Lord only knows how many tens of millions in his own right. He’s gone the ‘Gold Coast’ crowd one better—has his own private house here in Cambridge, and an apartment in Boston also, I’m told. He entered society there at the same time that he entered college; and he doesn’t think much of our social life—except the little set he’d already met in Boston and New York. He’s stiff and serious as a chief justice—self-conscious, condescending——” “Do you know him?” asked Sylvia.