Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/254



the Thanksgiving game, a great peace, a lying-fallow time, a period of unconscious adjustment and assimilation of all that mass of experience.

Neale moved back to the Frat. house, rooming with Harry Gregg, a classmate of his and a fine fellow, thought Neale, even though not athletic. He and Gregg had chanced to take much the same courses and were in the same class-rooms in several subjects. After a preliminary stagger or two, like a man coming indoors after living in the open, who cannot walk across the room without tripping over the furniture, Neale's mind settled down to his studies. He found them rather more interesting than he had expected. A course in general European history especially held him, and he gave much more time to the outside reading prescribed than he would have confessed to any member of his Frat. except Gregg, who took it as a matter of course. He encountered some personalities there who held him and about whom he often thought, big figures who dwarfed the life around him when they stood up beside his study table. Cromwell was one and Garibaldi another. But they were not all soldiers. Wise old scouts like Sully, Oxenstierna and Plombal who did the real work and let the cloth-of-gold opera-tenor kings and potentates prance around in the lime-light, they took Neale's fancy too. They were the boys for him! He used to sit back and laugh to himself to think how much more they must have enjoyed the real exercise of their own strength than the silly sovereigns could have enjoyed their silly lime-light. As for Henry IV and his lady-loves, he reminded Neale so forcibly of Mike and his lady-loves that he could never take that white-plumed monarch seriously. Henry of Navarre made him laugh at Mike and Mike made him laugh at Henry of Navarre, and over both 246