The tension grew greater and greater. The upper-classmen were quiet and businesslike, but most of the freshmen were frankly terrified. A few of them packed their trunks and slunk away, and a few more openly scorned the examinations and their frightened classmates; but they were the exceptions. All the buoyancy seemed gone out of the college; nothing was left but an intense strain. The dormitories were strangely quiet at night. There was no playing of golf in the hallways, no rolling of bats down the stairs, no shouting, no laughter; a man who made any noise was in danger of a serious beating. Even the greetings as the men passed each other on the campus were quiet and abstracted. They ceased to cut classes. Everybody attended, and everybody paid close attention even to the most tiresome instructors. Studious seniors began to reap a harvest out of tutoring sections. The meetings were a dollar "a throw," and for another dollar a student could get a mimeographed outline of a course. But the tutoring sections were only for the "plutes" or the athletes, many of whom were subsidized by fraternities or alumni. Most of the students had to learn their own lessons; so they often banded together in small groups to make the task less arduous, finding some relief in sociability. The study groups, quite properly called seminars, would have shocked many a worthy professor had he been able to attend one; but they were truly educative, and to many students inspiring. The professor had planted the seed of wisdom with them; it was at the seminars that they tried honestly, if somewhat hysterically and irreverently, to make it grow. Hugh did most of his studying alone, fearing that the seminars would degenerate into bull sessions, as many of them did; but Carl insisted that he join one group that was going "to wipe up that goddamned English course to-night." There were only five men at the seminar, which met in Surrey 19, because Pudge Jamieson, who was "rating" an A in the course and was therefore an authority, said that he wouldn't come if there were any more. Pudge, as his nickname suggests, was plump. He was a round-faced, jovial youngster who learned everything with consummate ease, wrote with great fluency and sometimes real beauty, peered through his horn-rimmed spectacles amusedly at the world, and read every "smut" book that he could lay his hands on. His library of erotica was already famous throughout the college, his volumes of Balzac's "Droll Stories," Rabelais complete, "Mlle. de Maupin," Burton's "Arabian Nights," and the "Decameron" being in constant demand. He could tell literally hundreds of dirty stories, always having a new one on tap, always looking when he told it like a complacent cherub.