She could not go to the station to see him off,--there was so much to be done on the mountain; but he held her tightly against him for a long, long hug and kiss, and walked bravely away.
He sat down on the big stone by the dummy gap-gate. A racking tendency to cry tore at his throat. He was a man, going out into the world of men. He beat the rock with clenched hands.
He was not bidding good-by to his mother, and the mountain. He shut them from him when he went to sleep each night; in the morning they were his again. This was only a longer separation. He was going north not to leave them, but to make himself a better son of his mother, a better son of the mountain. He would return, and then,--
One of his youthful magic rites came to him. Standing on his toes, facing the mountain,--stretching to his full height, with head thrown back and hands spread above his head, he posed, a taut, slim figure, poised beneath climbing tree-trunks of gray, and the leafy clouds above them. For a long moment the world stood still for him. This was his farewell and his benediction.
He slung his raincoat over his shoulder, adjusted the tennis racket and shiny suit-case in his left hand, and passed through the gate.
The temporary heroic mood, that had marked his departure from the mountain, wilted on the long railroad journey. He was very lonely at first, in New Haven. The town was dead and deserted, as he took the entrance exams. In the interval of uncertain waiting, he brought out his disused stamp album, and spent solitary evenings rearranging every stamp in the book.
With the next week, he began to feel at home. Every train vomited a riot of eager boys,--recent alumni back for the opening fun, self-conscious upper classmen, timid beginners like himself. The excitement of making new friends, and learning the immemorial lore of Yale, pulled him out of his shell of seclusion. He became one of the crowd, an atom swirling through unaccustomed channels of a fresh social body.
He grew at once into Sheff's boisterous feeling of superiority over the placid, plugging Academic grinds. He snorted when compulsory chapel was mentioned. Why, he would be a junior next year, when these staid classical freshmen would be mere sophomores. That was what Sheff did to a fellow!