window-seat looking down on the yard and realizing dimly this clamor,
breathless and immediate, in which it seemed he was never to have
a part.

Curiously enough he found in senior year that he had acquired a position
in his class. He learned that he was looked upon as a rather romantic
figure, a scholar, a recluse, a tower of erudition. This amused him but
secretly pleased him--he began going out, at first a little and then a
great deal. He made the Pudding. He drank--quietly and in the proper
tradition. It was said of him that had he not come to college so young
he might have "done extremely well." In 1909, when he graduated, he was
only twenty years old.

Then abroad again--to Rome this time, where he dallied with architecture
and painting in turn, took up the violin, and wrote some ghastly Italian
sonnets, supposedly the ruminations of a thirteenth-century monk on the
joys of the contemplative life. It became established among his Harvard
intimates that he was in Rome, and those of them who were abroad that
year looked him up and discovered with him, on many moonlight
excursions, much in the city that was older than the Renaissance or
indeed than the republic. Maury Noble, from Philadelphia, for instance,
remained two months, and together they realized the peculiar charm of
Latin women and had a delightful sense of being very young and free in a
civilization that was very old and free. Not a few acquaintances of his
grandfather's called on him, and had he so desired he might have been
_persona grata_ with the diplomatic set--indeed, he found that his
inclinations tended more and more toward conviviality, but that long
adolescent aloofness and consequent shyness still dictated to
his conduct.