one group that was going “to wipe up that god¬ damned English course to-night.”
There were only five men at the seminar, which met in Surrey 19, because Pudge Jamieson, who was “rating” an A in the course and was therefore an authority, said that he would n’t come if there were any more. Pudge, as his nickname suggests, was plump. He was a round-faced, jovial youngster who learned everything with consummate ease, wrote with great fluency and sometimes real beauty, peered through his horn-rimmed spectacles amusedly at the world, and read every “smut” book that he could lay his hands on. His library of erotica was already famous throughout the college, his volumes of Balzac’s “Droll Stories,” Rabelais complete, “Mile, de Maupin,” Burton’s “Arabian Nights,” and the “Decameron” being in constant demand. He could tell literally hundreds of dirty stories, always having a new one on tap, always looking when he told it like a complacent cherub.
There were two other men in the seminar. Freddy Dickson, an earnest, anemic youth, seemed to be always striving for greater acceleration and never gaining it; or as Pudge put it, “The trouble with Freddy is that he’s always shifting gears.” Larry Stillwell, the last man, was a dark, hand¬ some youth with exceedingly regular features, pomaded hair parted in the center and shining
