distance, still with detachment, he questioned his companion. He asked first what university, as if for a sign of freemasonry. Carron confessed to not graduating from Harvard. The idea of not graduating, of voluntarily leaving such institution, was difficult for Rader to understand. What college had been his own, and what honors there, he did not volunteer—one of the obscure, austere New England institutions no doubt—but it made no difference about the college. The universal stamp was on him of the man of the world of books. Not scientist, not psychist, not a student of any practical knowledge, but reader of histories in dead languages, dreamer over poetry in archaic forms, pursuer of the derivations of words through volumes; to whom Herodotus was as recent as Guizot, and both contemporary with himself; to whom the Bucolics were more real than the boys driving cattle down the cañon valley.
In such company as this, book company, he sat, lived; and, from such a world he looked distantly at the young man as at a symbol of the other outside active world. It was of this other world only that he inquired; and Carron put aside the questions that were foremost in his own mind, and surrendered himself to satisfying the awakened curiosity.
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