rule that would forbid freshmen to be outdoors after curfew, for he
wanted to ramble through the shadowy scented lanes, where Witherspoon
brooded like a dark mother over Whig and Clio, her Attic children,
where the black Gothic snake of Little curled down to Cuyler and Patton,
these in turn flinging the mystery out over the placid slope rolling to
the lake.

* * * *

Princeton of the daytime filtered slowly into his consciousness--West
and Reunion, redolent of the sixties, Seventy-nine Hall, brick-red and
arrogant, Upper and Lower Pyne, aristocratic Elizabethan ladies not quite
content to live among shopkeepers, and, topping all, climbing with clear
blue aspiration, the great dreaming spires of Holder and Cleveland towers.

From the first he loved Princeton--its lazy beauty, its half-grasped
significance, the wild moonlight revel of the rushes, the handsome,
prosperous big-game crowds, and under it all the air of struggle that
pervaded his class. From the day when, wild-eyed and exhausted, the
jerseyed freshmen sat in the gymnasium and elected some one from Hill
School class president, a Lawrenceville celebrity vice-president, a
hockey star from St. Paul's secretary, up until the end of sophomore year
it never ceased, that breathless social system, that worship, seldom
named, never really admitted, of the bogey "Big Man."

First it was schools, and Amory, alone from St. Regis', watched the
crowds form and widen and form again; St. Paul's, Hill, Pomfret, eating
at certain tacitly reserved tables in Commons, dressing in their own
corners of the gymnasium, and drawing unconsciously about them a barrier
of the slightly less important but socially ambitious to protect them