He darts out into the hall and reappears in a moment, a worm on either
side. Both worms will fit in easily with the youthful assortment already
gathered--neither can be more than twenty-five.

Oliver Crowe is nearly six feet, vividly dark, a little stooping, dressed
like anybody else in the Yale Club from hair parted in the middle to low
heavyish brown shoes, though the punctured patterns on the latter are a
year or so out of date. There is very little that is remarkable about
his appearance except the round, rather large head that shows writer or
pugilist indifferently, brilliant eyes, black as black warm marble under
heavy tortoise-shell glasses and a mouth that is not weak in the least
but somehow burdened by a pressure upon it like a pressure of wings, the
pressure of that kind of dream which will not release the flesh it inhabits
always and agonizes often until it is given perfect body and so does not
release it until such flesh has ceased. At present he is not the
youngest anything, except, according to himself 'the youngest failure in
advertising,' but a book of nakedly youthful love-poetry, which in gloomy
moments he wishes had never been written, although the _San Francisco
Warbler_ called it as 'tensely vital as the Shropshire Lad,' brought him
several column reviews and very nearly forty dollars in cash at twenty-one
and since then many people of his own age and one or two editors have
considered him "worth watching."

Ted Billett is dark too, but it is a ruddy darkness with high clear color
of skin. He could pass anywhere as a College Senior and though his clothes
seem to have been put on anyhow with no regard for pressing or tailoring
they will always raise a doubt in the minds of the uninstructed as to
whether it is not the higher carelessness that has dictated them rather
than ordinary poverty--a doubt that, in many cases, has proved innocently
fortunate for Ted. His hands are a curious mixture of square executive