fellows were really soused, I ’ll eat my hat, but we ’ll say that there were fifty. Fifty were quite enough to m^ke the whole Prom look like a long¬ shoreman’s ball. You’ve got to take the musi into consideration, too. That orchestra could eertainly play jazz; it could play it too damn well. Why, that music was enough to make a saint shed his halo and shake a shimmy.
“What I’m getting to is this: there are over a thousand fellows in college, and out of that thou¬ sand not more than fifty were really soused at the Prom, and not more than a hundred and seventydve were even a little teed. To go around say¬ ing that Sanford men are a lot of muckers just be¬ cause a small fraction of them acted like gutterjrnps is sheer bunk. The Prom was a drunken mawl, but all Sanford men are n’t drunkards—not )y a damn sight.”
Hugh had to admit the force of Gates’s reasonng, and he found comfort in it. He had been just ibout ready to believe that all college men and San*ord men in particular were hardly better than comnon muckers. But in the end the comfort that he ^ot was small: he realized bitterly that he was one if the minority that had disgraced his college; he vas one of the gutter-pups. The recognition of hat undeniable fact cut deep.
He was determined to redeem himself; he had o, somehow. Living a life of perfect rectitude
