Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/239



and Grandfather's house looked queer and countrified and old-fashioned. It was a long long way from a Frat. house on 113th Street to that plain bedroom so full of his little-boy and prep-school personality that Neale felt ill at ease and restless there. How could you live up to your ideal of Horatian calm and sophisticated tolerance towards human life in the presence of people who had known you when you were in short trousers, who only a few years before had been giving you hot lemonade for a cold and tucking you up in bed? No, West Adams was impossible! He looked inside the Emerson one day, remembering what an impression it had made on him, and found it like West Adams, very dull. "The man is so terribly in earnest!" he told himself and was enchanted at the superior, Oscar Wilde tone of his dictum.

The next day he thought of Billy Peters and knew that he was saved. Billy was the most amusing of his Frat. brothers, the one now nearest to him, for he remembered that Billy spent the summers in the Berkshires. He wrote to Billy asking him to come up for a couple of weeks and go camping with him, somewhere up the Deerfield. Neale would meet him at whatever station Billy could make and they would start at once. He didn't invite Billy to Grandfather's, not because he was ashamed of Grandfather's—not at all—he just didn't think it would interest Billy there. In due time Billy's answer came, asking Neale to cut out the wilderness project and come down to make him a visit in the Berkshires. Neale considered, he liked Billy; and West Adams was deadly dull. Why not? There was no good reason why not; he packed his suit-case and went.

Billy met him and drove him to the Peters' cottage, a remodeled farm-house several miles from town. Mrs. Peters was 321