Three or four such experiences ended Peter's dining out. He was
recognized as unavailable material. He received an occasional card to a
reception or a dance, for anything in trousers passes muster for such
functions. He always went when invited, and was most dutiful in the
counter-calls. In fact, society was to him a duty which he discharged
with the same plodding determination with which he did his day's
studies. He never dreamed of taking his social moments frivolously. He
did not recognize that society is very much like a bee colony--stinging
those who approached it shyly and quietly, but to be mastered by a bold
beating of tin pans. He neither danced nor talked, and so he was shunted
by the really pleasant girls and clever women, and passed his time with
wall-flowers and unbearables, who, in their normal sourness, regarded
and, perhaps, unconsciously made him feel, hardly to his encouragement,
that his companionship was a sort of penance. If he had been asked, at
the end of his senior year, what he thought of young women and society,
he would probably have stigmatized them, as he himself had been
formerly: "not nice." All of which, again to apply Mr. Pierce's theory,
merely meant that the phases which his own characteristics had shown
him, had re-acted on his own mind, and had led him to conclude that
girls and society were equally unendurable.

The condition was a dangerous one, and if psychology had its doctors
they would have predicted a serious heart illness in store for him. How
serious, would depend largely on whether the fever ran its natural
course, or whether it was driven inwards by disappointment. If these
doctors had ceased studying his mental condition and glanced at his
physical appearance, they would have had double cause to shake their
heads doubtingly.