Tom D’Invilliers and Amory walked late in those days. A gambling fever swept through the sophomore class and they bent over the bones till three o’clock many a sultry night. After one session they came out of Sloane’s room to find the dew fallen and the stars old in the sky.

“Let’s borrow bicycles and take a ride,” Amory suggested.

“All right. I’m not a bit tired and this is almost the last night of the year, really, because the prom stuff starts Monday.”

They found two unlocked bicycles in Holder Court and rode out about half-past three along the Lawrenceville Road.

“What are you going to do this summer, Amory?”

“Don’t ask me — same old things, I suppose. A month or two in Lake Geneva — I’m counting on you to be there in July, you know — then there’ll be Minneapolis, and that means hundreds of summer hops, parlor-snaking, getting bored — But oh, Tom,” he added suddenly, “hasn’t this year been slick!”

“No,” declared Tom emphatically, a new Tom, clothed by Brooks, shod by Franks, “I’ve won this game, but I feel as if I never want to play another. You’re all right — you’re a rubber ball, and somehow it suits you, but I’m sick of adapting myself to the local snobbishness of this corner of the world. I want to go where people aren’t barred because of the color of their neckties and the roll of their coats.”

“You can’t, Tom,” argued Amory, as they rolled along through the scattering night; “wherever you go now you’ll always unconsciously apply these standards of ‘having it’ or ‘lacking it.’ For better or worse we’ve stamped you; you’re a Princeton type!”

“Well, then,” complained Tom, his cracked voice rising plaintively, “why do I have to come back at all? I’ve learned all that Princeton has to offer. Two years more of mere pedantry and lying around a club aren’t going to help. They’re just going to disorganize me, conventionalize me completely. Even now I’m so spineless that I wonder how I get away with it.”

“Oh, but you’re missing the real point, Tom,” Amory interrupted. “You’ve just had your eyes opened to the snobbishness of the world in a rather abrupt manner. Princeton invariably gives the thoughtful man a social sense.”

“You consider you taught me that, don’t you?” he asked quizzically, eyeing Amory in the half dark.

Amory laughed quietly.

“Didn’t I?”

“Sometimes,” he said slowly, “I think you’re my bad angel. I might have been a pretty fair poet.”

“Come on, that’s rather hard. You chose to come to an Eastern college. Either your eyes were opened to the mean scrambling quality of people, or you’d have gone through blind, and you’d hate to have done that — been like Marty Kaye.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “you’re right. I wouldn’t have liked it. Still, it’s hard to be made a cynic at twenty.”