in their charms; and Basil Randolph held that role in Churchton. No alumnus
himself, he viewed, year after year, the passing procession of
undergraduates who possessed in their young present so much that he had
left behind or had never had at all, and who were walking, potentially,
toward a promising future in which he could take no share. Most of these
had been commonplace young fellows enough--noisy, philistine, glaringly
cursory and inconsiderate toward their elders; but a few of them--one now
and then, at long intervals--he would have enjoyed knowing, and knowing
intimately. On these infrequent occasions would come a union of frankness,
comeliness and _elan_, and the rudiments of good manners. But no one
in all the long-drawn procession had stopped to look at him a second time.
And now he was turning gray; he was tragically threatened with what might
in time become a paunch. His kind heart, his forthreaching nature, went for
naught; and the young men let him, walk under the elms and the scrub-oaks
neglected. If they had any interest beyond their egos, their fraternities,
and (conceivably) their studies, that interest dribbled away on the
quadrangle that housed the girl students. "If they only realized how much a
friendly hand, extended to them from middle life, might do for their
futures...!" he would sometimes sigh. But the youthful egoists, ignoring
him still, faced their respective futures, however uncertain, with much
more confidence than he, backed by whatever assurances and accumulations he
enjoyed, could face his own.

"To be young!" he said. "To be young!"

Do you figure Basil Randolph, alongside his portiere, as but the observer,
the _raisonneur_, in this narrative? If so, you err. What!--you may
ask,--a rival, a competitor? That more nearly.

It was Medora Phillips herself who, within a moment or two, inducted him