St. Paul's, with its great rinks; Pomfret and St. George's, prosperous
and well-dressed; Taft and Hotchkiss, which prepared the wealth of the
Middle West for social success at Yale; Pawling, Westminster, Choate,
Kent, and a hundred others; all milling out their well-set-up,
conventional, impressive type, year after year; their mental stimulus
the college entrance exams; their vague purpose set forth in a hundred
circulars as "To impart a Thorough Mental, Moral, and Physical Training
as a Christian Gentleman, to fit the boy for meeting the problems of
his day and generation, and to give a solid foundation in the Arts and
Sciences."

At St. Regis' Amory stayed three days and took his exams with a scoffing
confidence, then doubling back to New York to pay his tutelary visit.
The metropolis, barely glimpsed, made little impression on him, except
for the sense of cleanliness he drew from the tall white buildings seen
from a Hudson River steamboat in the early morning. Indeed, his mind was
so crowded with dreams of athletic prowess at school that he considered
this visit only as a rather tiresome prelude to the great adventure.
This, however, it did not prove to be.

Monsignor Darcy's house was an ancient, rambling structure set on a hill
overlooking the river, and there lived its owner, between his trips to
all parts of the Roman-Catholic world, rather like an exiled Stuart king
waiting to be called to the rule of his land. Monsignor was forty-four
then, and bustling--a trifle too stout for symmetry, with hair the color
of spun gold, and a brilliant, enveloping personality. When he came into
a room clad in his full purple regalia from thatch to toe, he resembled
a Turner sunset, and attracted both admiration and attention. He had
written two novels: one of them violently anti-Catholic, just before his
conversion, and five years later another, in which he had attempted to