who it was.  Respect for his motives, however, and his unimpeachable record saved him from everything but an admonition from the president, which changed into a discussion of cotton printing before that august official had delivered half of his intended rebuke.  People might not enthuse over Peter, but no one ever quarrelled with him.  So the interview, after travelling from cotton prints to spring radishes, ended with a warm handshake, and a courteous suggestion that he come again when there should be no charges nor admonitions to go through with.  Watts told him that he was a “devilish lucky” fellow to have been on hand to help, for Peter had proved his pluck to his class, had made a friend of the president and, as Watts considerately put it:  “but for your being on the corner at 11:10 that evening, old chap, you’d never have known me.”  Truly on such small chances do the greatest events of our life turn.  Perhaps, could Peter have looked into the future, he would have avoided that corner.  Perhaps, could he have looked even further, he would have found that in that chance lay the greatest happiness of his life.  Who can tell, when the bitter comes, and we later see how we could have avoided it, what we should have encountered in its place?  Who can tell, when sweet comes, how far it is sweetened by the bitterness that went before?  Dodging the future in this world is a success equal to that of the old woman who triumphantly announced that she had borrowed money enough to pay all her debts.

As a matter of course Watts was grateful for the timely assistance, and was not slow either to say or show it.  He told his own set of fellows that he was “going to take that Stirling up and make him one of us,” and Watts had a remarkable way of doing what he chose.  At first Peter did not respond to the overtures and insistance of the handsome, well-dressed, free-spending, New York swell.  He was too conscious of the difference between himself and Watts’s set, to wish or seek identification with them.  But no one who ever came under Watts’s influence could long stand out against his sunny face and frank manner, and so Peter eventually allowed himself to be “taken up.”  Perhaps the resistance encountered only whetted Watts’s intention.  He was certainly aided by Peter’s isolation.  Whether the cause was single or multiple, Peter was soon in a set from which many a seemingly far more eligible fellow was debarred.

Strangely enough, it did not change him perceptibly.  He still plodded on conscientiously at his studies, despite laughter and attempts to drag him away from them.  He still lived absolutely within the comfortable allowance that his mother gave him.  He still remained the quiet, serious looking fellow of yore.  The “gang,” as they styled themselves, called him “kill-joy,” “graveyard,” or “death’s head,” in their evening festivities, but Peter only puffed at his pipe good-naturedly, making no retort, and if the truth had really been spoken, not a man would have changed him a particle.  His silence and seriousness added the dash of contrast needed to make the evening perfect.  All joked him.  The most popular verse in a class-song Watts wrote, was devoted to burlesquing his soberness, the gang never tiring of singing at all hours and places: