Three or four such experiences ended Peter’s dining out.  He was recognized as unavailable material.  He received an occasional card to a reception or a dance, for anything in trousers passes muster for such functions.  He always went when invited, and was most dutiful in the counter-calls.  In fact, society was to him a duty which he discharged with the same plodding determination with which he did his day’s studies.  He never dreamed of taking his social moments frivolously.  He did not recognize that society is very much like a bee colony—­stinging those who approached it shyly and quietly, but to be mastered by a bold beating of tin pans.  He neither danced nor talked, and so he was shunted by the really pleasant girls and clever women, and passed his time with wall-flowers and unbearables, who, in their normal sourness, regarded and, perhaps, unconsciously made him feel, hardly to his encouragement, that his companionship was a sort of penance.  If he had been asked, at the end of his senior year, what he thought of young women and society, he would probably have stigmatized them, as he himself had been formerly:  “not nice.”  All of which, again to apply Mr. Pierce’s theory, merely meant that the phases which his own characteristics had shown him, had re-acted on his own mind, and had led him to conclude that girls and society were equally unendurable.

The condition was a dangerous one, and if psychology had its doctors they would have predicted a serious heart illness in store for him.  How serious, would depend largely on whether the fever ran its natural course, or whether it was driven inwards by disappointment.  If these doctors had ceased studying his mental condition and glanced at his physical appearance, they would have had double cause to shake their heads doubtingly.

Peter was not good-looking.  He was not even, in a sense, attractive.  In spite of his taking work so hardly and life so seriously, he was entirely too stout.  This gave a heaviness to his face that neutralized his really pleasant brown eyes and thick brown hair, which were his best features.  Manly the face was, but, except when speaking in unconscious moments, dull and unstriking.  A fellow three inches shorter, and two-thirds his weight would have been called tall.  “Big” was the favorite adjective used in describing Peter, and big he was.  Had he gone through college ten years later, he might have won unstinted fame and admiration as the full-back on the team, or stroke on the crew.  In his time, athletics were but just obtaining, and were not yet approved of either by faculties or families.  Shakespeare speaks of a tide in the affairs of men.  Had Peter been born ten years later the probabilities are that his name would have been in all the papers, that he would have weighed fifty pounds less, have been cheered by thousands, have been the idol of his class, have been a hero, have married the first girl he loved (for heroes, curiously, either marry or die, but never remain bachelors) and would have—­but as this is a tale of fact, we must not give rein to imagination.  To come back to realism, Peter was a hero to nobody but his mother.