"The happy, limited vision of youth!" he sighed. "You'll be through your a, b, c's before you know it. Are you going to face such big issues without any forethought?" He smoked for a few moments, then commenced to speak doubtfully. "And in another sense it isn't as far away as you think. It all goes on _in petto_, right here in undergraduate Princeton. The views a man takes away from college should be applicable to the conditions he meets outside." "I don't quite see what you mean, sir." Why was Bailly going at it so carefully? "I mean," Bailly said, "that here you have your poor men, your earnest men, and your lords of the land. I mean there is no real community of interest here. I mean you've made friends because you're bigger and better looking than most, and play football like a demon. You haven't made any friends simply because you are poor and earnest. And the poor students suffer from the cost of things, and the rich men don't know and don't care. And the poor men, and the men without family or a good school behind them, who haven't football or some outstanding usefulness, are as submerged as the workers in a mine. Prospect Street is Fifth Avenue or Park Lane, and the men who can't get in the clubs, because of poverty or lack of prominence, remind me of the ragged ones who cling to the railings, peering through at plenty with evil in their hearts." "You're advocating communism, sir?" Bailly shook his head. "I'm advocating nothing. I'm trying to find out what you advocate." "I can't help feeling," George said, stubbornly, "that a man has to look after himself." And as he walked home he confessed freely enough in his own mind: "I'm advocating George Morton. How can Squibs expect me to bother with any one else when I have so far to go?" XIX He thrust Squibs' uncomfortable prods from his brain. He applied himself to his books--useful books. Education and culture were more important to him than the physical reactions of overworked labour or the mental processes of men who advocated violence. Such distracting questions, however, were uncomfortably in the air. Allen, one of the poor men against whom the careful Rogers had warned him long ago, called on him one cold night. The manner of his address made George wonder if Squibs had been talking to him, too. "Would like a few minutes' chat, Morton. No one worth while's in Princeton. It won't queer you to have me in your room." No, George decided. That was an opening one might expect from Allen. The man projected an appreciable power from his big, bony figure; his angular face. George had heard vaguely that he had worked in a factory, preparing himself for college. He knew from his own observation that Allen wasn't above waiting at commons, and he had seen the lesser men turn to him as a leader.