work I had to do to earn my board. But I kind of got interested in learning things: I learned in spite of the instructors we had. They were a bunch of brokendown preachers: head full of dogma and intolerance and a belly full of big meaningless words. English literature course whittled Shakespeare down because he wrote about whores without pointing a moral, and one instructor always insisted that the head devil in Paradise Lost was an inspired prophetic portrait of Darwin, and they wouldn’t touch Byron with a ten foot pole, and Swinburne was reduced to his mother and his old standby, the ocean. And I guess they’d have cut this out had they worn one piece bathing suits in those days. But in spite of it, I kind of got interested in learning things. I would like to have looked inside of my mind, after that year was up. . . .” He gazed out over the water, over the snoring waves, steady and windfrothed. He laughed. “And I joined a fraternity, too, almost.”
The nephew bent over his pipe. Fairchild produced a package of cigarettes. The nephew accepted one with abstraction. He accepted a light, also. “I guess you’ve got your eye on a fraternity, haven’t you?” Fairchild suggested.
“Senior club,” the nephew corrected shortly. “If I can make it.”
“Senior club,” Fairchild repeated. “That means you won’t join for three years, eh? That’s a good idea. I like that idea. But I had to do everything in one year, you see. I couldn’t wait. I never had much time to mix with other students. Six hours a day at lectures, and the rest of the time working and studying for next day. But I couldn’t help but hear something about it, about rushing and pledges and so on, and how so-and-so were after this fellow and that, because he made the football team or something.
“There was a fellow at my boarding house; a kind of handsome tall fellow he was, always talking about the big athletes
