“Yes, that’s what I mean. So much bitterness and intriguing, because you keep to yourself! Why do you come to college at all? Surely you won’t say it’s the professors and the studies!”
“No,” said he, smiling in spite of himself.
“You come, and you make yourself into a kind of idol. Excuse me, if it isn’t polite, but what I said the other night is the truth—the Golden Calf! And what I say is, try the other plan a while. Stop thinking about yourself, and what they are thinking about you—above all, what they are thinking about your money. They won’t all be thinking about your money.”
He did not answer promptly. “Apparently,” she said, “you don’t feel quite sure. If you can’t, I know several real men that I could introduce you to—men right in your own class.”
She hesitated. She was about to say Frank Shirley, but concluded not to. “I met one the other day—he doesn’t belong to a club, yet he’s the most interesting person I’ve encountered here. He talked about you, and he wasn’t complimentary; but if you sought him out in the right way, and made it clear you weren’t trying to patronize him, I’m sure he’d be a friend.”
“Oh!” said van Tuiver, and looked annoyed.
“No more bitter than you need, Mr. van Tuiver—if you are going to hear the truth about yourself.”
The other hesitated. “I really do want to win your regard—” he began.
“I don’t want you to do anything to win my regard! If you do these things, it must be because you want to do them. At present you’re just your money, your position—your Royalty, as I’ve come to call it. But I’m not the least bit concerned about your Royalty; your houses and your servants and your automobiles are a bore to me—worse than that, they’re wicked, for no man has a right to spend so much money on himself, to have a whole house to himself——.”
“Please,” he pleaded, “stop scolding about my house. I couldn’t change now, for it’s only a couple of weeks to Commencement.”
“It would have all the more effect,” she declared, “if you moved into a dormitory now. Here are the class elections, and your class split up——”
“You don’t realize my position,” he interrupted. “It’s not merely a question of what I want. There’s Ridgely Shackleford, our candidate for class president; if I deserted him and went over to the ‘Yard,’ they’d say I was a traitor, a coward—worse than that, they’d say I was a fool! I wouldn’t have a friend left in the college.”