Although absorbed in his profession, Gordon's genial charm soon brought him invitations of a social nature. He became a member of a law club of men of his own age, which met once a month to compare impressions and banish dull care over a good dinner. Still eager for exercise he joined a rowing club on the river Nye, and a gymnasium. After he was admitted to the firm he had his name put up for election at one of the social clubs, The University, so called because its members were college graduates. Here he met the educated young men of the city, and though his mother had an old-fashioned prejudice against clubs, as aristocratic resorts where men gambled and drank more than was good for them, Gordon felt that he needed some place where he could play a game of whist or billiards with congenial spirits or look at magazines in a cosey library as an antidote to his sterner pursuits. Mrs. Perry was more than willing to trust her son, so she sighed and set down to the changed temper of the day the spread of Benham's club fever. For, like other progressive cities, Benham was fairly honeycombed with clubs. The American social instinct had become almost daft on the subject, and no two or three men or women could come together for any purpose without organizing. From a constitution and by-laws the road was apt to be short to rooms or a clubhouse. The University was one of half a dozen of the purely social clubs of the city, a spacious establishment, modelled on European traditions with American plumbing and other modern comforts. Gordon was prompted to join by Paul Howard, who declared that he preferred it for genuine enjoyment to the Eagle Club, the favorite resort of the very rich and fashionable--the Spread Eagle, as the malicious termed it. At The University there was secular instrumental music on Sunday afternoons, a custom copied from Boston, that former hotbed of ascetic Sabbath life, and on Saturday nights a cold supper was provided, about which stood in pleasant groups the active professional and business men of the city and those who followed the arts--musicians, painters, and literary men. "Exclusive and aristocratic all the same," said Hall Collins, contemptuously, one day when Gordon vouchsafed to him a glowing account of these Saturday nights. Hall was one of the moving spirits in the only other club of which Gordon was a member, The Citizens' Club, the somewhat ambitious title of an organization conducted by young men interested in civic and industrial reform, not unlike that to which the unhappy Emil Stuart had belonged.