fail utterly than by a niggardly margin! All things considered, one's chances of becoming a Bachelor of Arts were, not to put too fine a point on it, bloody,—and he leaned back and surveyed the toiling shoulders of sixty or eighty scholars in the throes of mnemonic travail. His gaze strayed beyond them to the window which framed an ancient building, scene of a thousand futile recitations. The hard brick outlines were tenderly blurred by the ivy, just as the institution itself, for all its impersonality, was mitigated by the tendrilly sentiments of three thousand youths who, clinging to it of necessity, were bound to love it. The institution had tortured him, but in its clumsy way it had revealed his individuality to him. It knew nothing about him, but it had been the fortuitous means of his finding out something about himself; of his finding out, chiefly, that he had nothing to do with it, any more than ivy had to do with brick. In what way he was unlike its other products, Harvard couldn't reveal to him: life alone would be able to do that. Or would it? It must.
In a few minutes he would walk out the door, never to come back. By ten o'clock—strange thought!—he would have been a student—of been, as Rhoda still wrote it. And not one human being here, not even the two or three monitors whose disillusioned eyes from time to time had wandered his way, lit by a faint spark of friendliness, really knew or cared what he was, or what was going to happen to him.
