early morning to get up his work in the library--he was out for the
Princetonian, competing furiously against forty others for the coveted
first place. In December he came down with diphtheria, and some one
else won the competition, but, returning to college in February, he
dauntlessly went after the prize again. Necessarily, Amory's
acquaintance with him was in the way of three-minute chats, walking
to and from lectures, so he failed to penetrate Burne's one absorbing
interest and find what lay beneath it.

Amory was far from contented. He missed the place he had won at
St. Regis', the being known and admired, yet Princeton stimulated him,
and there were many things ahead calculated to arouse the Machiavelli
latent in him, could he but insert a wedge. The upper-class clubs,
concerning which he had pumped a reluctant graduate during the
previous summer, excited his curiosity: Ivy, detached and breathlessly
aristocratic; Cottage, an impressive milange of brilliant adventurers
and well-dressed philanderers; Tiger Inn, broad-shouldered and athletic,
vitalized by an honest elaboration of prep-school standards; Cap and Gown,
anti-alcoholic, faintly religious and politically powerful; flamboyant
Colonial; literary Quadrangle; and the dozen others, varying in age and
position.

Anything which brought an under classman into too glaring a light was
labelled with the damning brand of "running it out." The movies thrived
on caustic comments, but the men who made them were generally running
it out; talking of clubs was running it out; standing for anything very
strongly, as, for instance, drinking parties or teetotalling, was running
it out; in short, being personally conspicuous was not tolerated, and the
influential man was the non-committal man, until at club elections in
sophomore year every one should be sewed up in some bag for the rest of