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Walt swallowed a lump, nervously opened a book that lay on the table, then looked at the big red sweater on the bed, and said: "I can't do it, Cap." Smith kicked a pillow of which he thought a great deal almost into the grate, and said with fine scorn: "When do you join the Phis?" "I don't know," said Van, drearily. "Well, I think you're nutty; it's the cheesiest gang in College."
Perhaps he could work to improve the crowd a little after he was one of them. At least there was no reason why they need be his only friends. He went to the lab one afternoon with his decision made. If the Phis asked him to dinner, he would go and put his head on the block.
He was not made any happier by Lyman's saying, "Whatever you do, don't join the Phis. They've no standing here, and you won't help yourself any." Freshmen usually listened to what Lyman said. But Haviland had thought and reasoned and struggled with himself, and had come to a conclusion. To write to his uncle, "I have joined the Phis because you are one," would be worth any sacrifice.
The professor was as red as a beet." "I don't blame him," said Duncan. "Why, the man is married and has two children." "Are you sure they're his," said Pellams, seriously. "I've seen them with him on the Quad, but I thought perhaps he'd borrowed them for effect, to keep off the Senior girls." "The year he came here the Beta Phis tried to rush him, didn't they?" asked Smith.
"'The key lay on the ground'," said Lynn resignedly, "'and sparkled in the darkness'." "Keys don't sparkle in the darkness, but go on," said Paul, writing away. "This one did," persisted the poor little authoress; "the fairies had smeared it with that phis, phos, oh, you know, that lovely shiny stuff we saw on the sea at night when we were in the ship."
Haviland wanted one sunbeam before the darkness. "Yes, I'll come, Cap," and turned to shake hands with the Phi, whose invitation was frozen half-way in his throat. Now the Beta Phis were not of the people who let to-morrow get anything while to-day lasts, so Higgins asked Walt to come down after dinner for the night, and the unhappy boy, half-hearing, promised.
Many a set, piled upon the beds in a fraternity room, sat up late talking him over and wondering how he was "coming on." The Beta Phis, for instance, were in painful doubt. They were conscious of a comparatively poor stack-up, but their rushing energy was admirable, and once the persecuted Haviland had been obliged to ask a Beta Rho to hide him from them.
Micawber, I don't know whether it was the effect of the cap, or the lavender water, or the phis, or the fire, or the wax-candles, but she came out of my room comparatively speaking l-l-lovely!" As deliciously ridiculous was the whole scene between Dora and David, where the latter, at length, takes courage to make his proposal "Jip barking madly all the time " Dora crying the while and trembling.
His sudden intimacy with the Phis could not escape the astonished Rhos; he was sensitive to the change in their manner, slight as it was. He would have been glad enough to have stayed out of fraternities altogether if it would have helped matters. There was a very jolly set in the Hall, men who had refused far better bids than the Phis.
In his mind's eye the Phis passed before him, one by one, particularly a certain long, unprepossessing member who had stayed till after twelve one night and bored him with a dreary recital of the prominence of his house in College politics, of the stump speeches that a former brother, now a historical personage, had made in Mayfield for prohibition, to say nothing of the essay prizes in philology that another ancient Phi had won in the dim past, when the chapter must have been more prominent than at present.
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