favourites in Harvard now, if there ever were: the classes are altogether
too big. And it wouldn't be ability, and it wouldn't be amiability alone,
that would give a man any sort of leadership."

"What in the world would it be?"

"That question, more than anything else, shows how long you've been away,
Jenny. It would be family--family, with a judicious mixture of the
others, and with money."

"Is it possible? But of course--I remember! Only at their age one thinks
of students as being all hail-fellow-well-met with each other--"

"Yes; it's hard to realise how conventional they are--how very much
worldlier than the world--till one sees it as one does in Cambridge. They
pique themselves on it. And Mr. Saintsbury"--she was one of those women
whom everything reminds of their husbands "says that it isn't a bad thing
altogether. He says that Harvard is just like the world; and even if it's
a little more so, these boys have got to live in the world, and they had
better know what it is. You may not approve of the Harvard spirit, and
Mr. Saintsbury doesn't sympathise with it; he only says it's the world's
spirit. Harvard men--the swells--are far more exclusive than Oxford men.
A student, 'comme il faut', wouldn't at all like to be supposed to know
another student whom we valued for his brilliancy, unless he was popular
and well known in college."

"Dear me!" cried Mrs. Pasmer. "But of course! It's perfectly natural,
with young people. And it's well enough that they should begin to
understand how things really are in the world early; it will save them
from a great many disappointments."