Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/255

 those hilarities Neale drew the decent veil of his calm, pipe-smoking stolidity.

One day browsing around in the Library, he saw the title of one of the books Miss Austin had spoken of the summer before, one of the books Neale had pretended to know and had never heard of. He drew it out (it was "Richard Feveral"), and read it, entranced, until early the next morning. After that he looked up, one by one, all the books she had mentioned, and read them, some with delight, some with blank incomprehensiveness, some with scorn.

He killed a lot of time discussing things in general with Gregg, reading Gregg's books. He fell especially hard for a worn volume of Poems and Ballads. For six weeks he was convinced that Swinburne had said the last word, a blighting word, on ethical values. Then one day he noticed that his favorite credo, "From too much love of living, from hope and fear set free" could be sung to the tune of the well-known, extremely coarse and very unpoetical song called, "Some die of drinking whiskey, some die of drinking beer," and it occurred to him suddenly that when you thought about it, both expressed the same philosophy. It was disgusting! It wasn't argument—but just the same it somehow put a crimp in Swinburne! He went back to his history and economics. But you couldn't stew over your books all day long; he drifted more or less with Billy Peters' innocuous, evening-dress, dancing-fussing set.

Outwardly he passed as a good fellow, a passable mixer though rather silent. Inwardly he had given up his pose of Horatian calm. It didn't work—not for him. He found himself very much alone and friendless. The other men on the football squad—well, they had been his blood-brothers during the season, but after the season they were mostly illiterate young rakes without a single mental spark even when they were drunk. As for Pete Hilliard's crowd and their small-town, back-alley ways of amusing themselves—hell! Neale felt for them the amused scorn of the native-born great-city dweller for the uneasy provincial who thinks he can hide his provincialism best by assuming a boisterous nastiness.