“I can’t explain exactly,” replied Arthur.  “It would take a long time.”

“I haven’t asked you to be brief.”

“I can’t put it into words.”

“Why not?”

“You would misunderstand.”

“Why?”

Arthur made no reply.

“Then you can’t tell me what you go to college for?”

Again the young man looked perplexedly at his father.  There was no anger in that tone—­no emotion of any kind.  But what was the meaning of the look, the look of a sorrow that was tragic?

“I know you think I’ve disgraced you, father, and myself,” said Arthur.  “But it isn’t so—­really, it isn’t.  No one, not even the faculty, thinks the less of me.  This sort of thing often occurs in our set.”

“Your ’set’?”

“Among the fellows I travel with.  They’re the nicest men in Harvard.  They’re in all the best clubs—­and lead in supporting the athletics and—­and—­their fathers are among the richest, the most distinguished men in the country.  There are only about twenty or thirty of us, and we make the pace for the whole show—­the whole university, I mean.  Everybody admires and envies us—­wants to be in our set.  Even the grinds look up to us, and imitate us as far as they can.  We give the tone to the university!”

“What is ’the tone’?”

Again Arthur shifted uneasily.  “It’s hard to explain that sort of thing.  It’s a sort of—­of manner.  It’s knowing how to do the—­the right sort of thing.”

“What is the right sort of thing?”

“I can’t put it into words.  It’s what makes you look at one man and say, ‘He’s a gentleman’; and look at another and see that he isn’t.”

“What is a ’gentleman’—­at Harvard?”

“Just what it is anywhere.”

“What is it anywhere?”

Again Arthur was silent.

“Then there are only twenty or thirty gentlemen at Harvard?  And the catalogue says there are three thousand or more students.”

“Oh—­of course,” began Arthur.  But he stopped short.

How could he make his father, ignorant of “the world” and dominated by primitive ideas, understand the Harvard ideal?  So subtle and evanescent, so much a matter of the most delicate shadings was this ideal that he himself often found the distinction quite hazy between it and that which looked disquietingly like “tommy rot.”

“And these gentlemen—­these here friends of yours—­your ‘set,’ as you call ’em—­what are they aiming for?”

Arthur did not answer.  It would be hopeless to try to make Hiram Ranger understand, still less tolerate, an ideal of life that was elegant leisure, the patronage of literature and art, music, the drama, the turf, and the pursuit of culture and polite extravagance, wholly aloof from the frenzied and vulgar jostling of the market place.