Carl's father assured him in every letter that he was extravagant. He ran through the two dollars in practically no time at all. He was a member in good and regular standing of the informal club that hung about the Corner Drug Store, to drink coffee soda and discuss athletics and stare at the passing girls. He loved to set off his clear skin and shining pale hair with linen collars, though soft roll-collar shirts were in vogue. And he was ready for any wild expedition, though it should cost fifty or sixty cents. With the sophomore second vice-president and John Terry of the freshman class (usually known as "the Turk") he often tramped to the large neighboring town of Jamaica Mills to play pool, smoke Turkish cigarettes, and drink beer. They always chorused Plato songs, in long-drawn close harmony. Once they had imported English ale, out of bottles, and carried the bottles back to decorate and distinguish their rooms. Carl's work at the boarding-house introduced him to pretty girl students, and cost him no social discredit whatever. The little college had the virtue of genuine democracy so completely that it never prided itself on being democratic. Mrs. Henkel, proprietor of the boarding-house, occasionally grew sarcastic to her student waiters as she stooped, red-faced and loosened of hair, over the range; she did suggest that they "kindly wash up a few of the dishes now and then before they went gallivantin' off." But songs arose from the freshmen washing and wiping dishes; they chucklingly rehashed jokes; they discussed the value of the "classical course" _versus_ the "scientific course." While they waited on table they shared the laughter and arguments that ran from student to student through Mrs. Henkel's dining-room--a sunny room bedecked with a canary, a pussy-cat, a gilded rope portière, a comfortable rocker with a Plato cushion, a Garland stove with nickel ornaments, two geraniums, and an oak-framed photograph of the champion Plato football team of 1899. Carl was readily accepted by the men and girls who gathered about the piano in the evening. His graceful-seeming body, his puppyish awkwardness, his quietly belligerent dignity, his eternal quest of new things, won him respect; though he was too boyish to rouse admiration, except in the breast of fat, pretty, cheerful, fuzzy-haired, candy-eating Mae Thurston. Mae so influenced Carl that he learned to jest casually; and he practised a new dance, called the "Boston," which Mae had brought from Minneapolis, though as a rival to the waltz and two-step the new dance was ridiculed by every one. He mastered all the _savoir faire_ of the boarding-house. But he was always hurrying away from it to practise football, to prowl about the Plato power-house, to skim through magazines in the Y. M. C. A. reading-room, even to study.