Page:The plastic age, (IA plasticage00mark).pdf/77

 ==CHAPTER VIII==

THE dormitory initiations had more than angered Hugh; they had completely upset his mental equilibrium: his every ideal of college swayed and wabbled. He was n’t a prig, but he had come to Sanford with very definite ideas about the place, and those ideas were already groggy from the unmerciful pounding they were receiving.

His father was responsible for his illusions, if one may call them illusions. Mr. Carver was a shy, sensitive man well along in his fifties, with a wife twelve years his junior. He pretended to cul¬ tivate his small farm in Merrytown, but as a matter of fact he lived off of a comfortable income left him by his very capable father. He spent most of his time reading the eighteenth-century essayists, John Donne’s poetry, the “Atlantic Monthly,” the “Bos¬ ton Transcript,” and playing Mozart on his violin. He did not understand his wife and was thoroughly afraid of his son; Hugh had an animal vigor that at times almost terrified him.

At his wife’s insistence he had a talk with Hugh the night before the boy left for college. Hugh Rh