It seemed to him undue that a person who exchanged repartees with the
young lady boarders across his desk, when they came many times a day to
look at the register, or to ask for letters, should remain snubbed by a
girl who still wore her hair in a braid; but he was an amiable youth, and
he tried to appease her by little favors and services, instead of trying
to bully her.

He was great friends with the head-waiter, whom he respected as a college
student, though for the time being he ranked the student socially. He had
him in behind the frame of letter-boxes, which formed a sort of little
private room for him, and talked with him at such hours of the forenoon
and the late evening as the student was off duty. He found comfort in the
student's fretful strength, which expressed itself in the pugnacious
frown of his hot-looking young face, where a bright sorrel mustache was
beginning to blaze on a short upper lip.

Fane thought himself a good-looking fellow, and he regarded his figure
with pleasure, as it was set off by the suit of fine gray check that he
wore habitually; but he thought Gregory's educational advantages told in
his face. His own education had ended at a commercial college, where he
acquired a good knowledge of bookkeeping, and the fine business hand he
wrote, but where it seemed to him sometimes that the earlier learning of
the public school had been hermetically sealed within him by several
coats of mathematical varnish. He believed that he had once known a
number of things that he no longer knew, and that he had not always been
so weak in his double letters as he presently found himself.

One night while Gregory sat on a high stool and rested his elbow on the
desk before it, with his chin in his hand, looking down upon Fane, who
sprawled sadly in his chair, and listening to the last dance playing in