“You’ll have to excuse me,” he said, taking off his hat.  “I don’t believe I can take a walk with you to-night.  I—­you see—­I’ve got a good deal of work to do; I think I’ll have to leave you.”  Then he bowed to her with his hat in his hand, hurrying away before she could answer him a word.

He found Geary alone in their room, cribbing “’Horace” again.

“Ah, you bet,” Geary said.  “I shook those chippies.  I sized them up right away.  I was clever enough for that.  They were no good.  I thought you would get enough of it.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Vandover after a while, as he settled to his drawing.  “She was pretty common, but anyhow I don’t want to help bring down a poor girl like that any lower than she is already.”  This saying struck Vandover as being very good and noble, and he found occasion to repeat it to young Haight the next day.

But within three days of this, at the time when Vandover would have fancied himself farthest from such a thing, he underwent a curious reaction.  On a certain evening, moved by an unreasoned instinct, he sought out the girl who had just filled him with such deep pity and such violent disgust, and that night did not come back to the room in Matthew’s.  The thing was done almost before he knew it.  He could not tell why he had acted as he did, and he certainly would not have believed himself capable of it.

He passed the next few days in a veritable agony of repentance, overwhelmed by a sense of shame and dishonour that were almost feminine in their bitterness and intensity.  He felt himself lost, unworthy, and as if he could never again look a pure woman in the eyes unless with an abominable hypocrisy.  He was ashamed even before Geary and young Haight, and went so far as to send a long letter to his father acknowledging and deploring what he had done, asking for his forgiveness and reiterating his resolve to shun such a thing forever after.

What had been bashfulness in the boy developed in the young man to a profound respect and an instinctive regard for women.  This stood him in good stead throughout all his four years of Harvard life.  In general, he kept himself pretty straight.  There were plenty of fast girls and lost women about Cambridge, but Vandover found that he could not associate with them to any degree of satisfaction.  He never knew how to take them, never could rid himself of the idea that they were to be treated as ladies.  They, on their part, did not like him; he was too diffident, too courteous, too “slow.”  They preferred the rough self-assertion and easy confidence of Geary, who never took “no” as an answer and who could chaff with them on their own ground.