"Let the others think they've done us a good turn," he went on. "We have to live in the same class without clawing each other's faces every time we meet, but you can't pull the wool over my eyes, and I won't try to pull it over yours. Now get out, and don't come here alone again." He felt better and cleaner after that. When Dalrymple had gone he finished his chapter and tumbled into bed. XVIII George was glad of the laundry, indeed, as the holidays approached. It gave him a sound excuse for not dashing joyously from Princeton with the rest, but it didn't cure the depression with which he saw the college empty. He wandered about a campus as deserted as a city swept by pestilence, asking himself what he would have done if his father and mother hadn't exiled him as thoroughly as Old Planter had. There was no point thinking about that; it wasn't even a question. He took long walks or stayed in his room, reading, and once or twice answering regretfully invitations that had sprung from encounters at Betty's party. It was nice to have them, but of course he couldn't go to such affairs alone just yet. Besides, he didn't have the money. Squibs Bailly limped all the way up his stairs one day, scolding him for sulking in his tent. "I only heard last night that you were in town. I'm not psychic. Why haven't you been around?" "I didn't want to bother----" Bailly interrupted him. "I'm afraid I didn't appreciate you went quite so much alone." "Altogether alone," George said. "But I don't want anybody to feel sorry for me because of that. It has some advantages." "You're too young to say such things," Bailly said. He made George go to the Dickinson Street house for Christmas dinner. There was no other guest. The rooms were bright with holly, and a very small but dazzling Christmas tree stood in a corner, bearing a gift for him. Mrs. Bailly, as he entered, touched his cheek with her lips and welcomed him by his first name. She created for him an illusion that made him choke a trifle. She made him feel as if he had come home. "And," he thought, "Squibs and she know." He wondered if it was that knowledge that made Squibs go into his social views one evening when he sat with him in the study. It was then that George realized he had no such views apart from his own case. Vaguely he knew that somewhere outside of Princeton strikes multiplied these days, that poor people complained of the cost of food and housing, that communistic propaganda was talked with an increasing freedom, that now and then a bomb burst, destroying more often than not the people it was designed to help. He saw that Squibs sought to interest him, and he gave a close attention while the tutor elaborated his slight knowledge of the growing unrest. "But it's all so far away, sir," he said. "I've so much of more importance to me to bother about right here." Bailly relighted his pipe.