What had been bashfulness in the boy developed in the young man to a
profound respect and an instinctive regard for women. This stood him in
good stead throughout all his four years of Harvard life. In general, he
kept himself pretty straight. There were plenty of fast girls and lost
women about Cambridge, but Vandover found that he could not associate
with them to any degree of satisfaction. He never knew how to take them,
never could rid himself of the idea that they were to be treated as
ladies. They, on their part, did not like him; he was too diffident, too
courteous, too "slow." They preferred the rough self-assertion and easy
confidence of Geary, who never took "no" as an answer and who could
chaff with them on their own ground.

Vandover did poor work at Harvard and only graduated, as Geary said, "by
a squeak." Besides his regular studies he took time to pass three
afternoons a week in the studio of a Boston artist, where he studied
anatomy and composition and drew figures from the nude. In the summer
vacations he did not return home, but accompanied this artist on
sketching tours along the coast of Maine. His style improved immensely
the moment he abandoned flat studies and began to work directly from
Nature. He drew figures well, showed a feeling for desolate landscapes,
and even gave promise of a good eye for colour. But he allowed his
fondness for art to interfere constantly with his college work. By the
middle of his senior year he was so loaded with conditions that it was
only Geary's unwearied coaching that pulled him through at all--as
Vandover knew it would, for that matter.

Vandover returned to San Francisco when he was twenty-two. It was
astonishing; he had gone away a pimply, overgrown boy, raw and callow as
a fledgling, constrained in society, diffident, awkward. Now he