Little by little the idea of college life became more attractive to Vandover; at the worst, it was only postponing the Paris trip, not abandoning it.  Besides this, two of his chums from the High School were expecting to enter Harvard that fall, and he could look forward to a very pleasant four years spent in their company.

Out at Cambridge the term was just closing.  The Old Gentleman’s friends procured him tickets to several of the more important functions.  From the gallery of Memorial Hall Vandover and his father saw some of the great dinners; they went up to New London for the boat-race; they gained admittance to the historic Yard on Class-day, and saw the strange football rush for flowers around the “Tree.”  They heard the seniors sing “Fair Harvard” for the last time, and later saw them receive their diplomas at Sander’s Theatre.

The great ceremonies of the place, the picturesqueness of the elm-shaded Yard, the old red dormitories covered with ivy, the associations and traditions of the buildings, the venerable pump, Longfellow’s room, the lecture hall where the minute-men had barracked, all of these things, in the end, appealed strongly to Vandover’s imagination.  Instead of passing the summer months in an ocean voyage and a continental journey, he at last became content to settle down to work under a tutor, “boning up” for the examinations.  His father returned to San Francisco in July.

Vandover matriculated the September of the same year; on the first of October he signed the college rolls and became a Harvard freshman.  At that time he was eighteen years old.

Chapter Two

There was little of the stubborn or unyielding about Vandover, his personality was not strong, his nature pliable and he rearranged himself to suit his new environment at Harvard very rapidly.  Before the end of the first semester he had become to all outward appearances a typical Harvardian.  He wore corduroy vests and a gray felt hat, the brim turned down over his eyes.  He smoked a pipe and bought himself a brindled bull-terrier.  He cut his lectures as often as he dared, “ragged” signs and barber-poles, and was in continual evidence about Foster’s and among Leavitt and Pierce’s billiard-tables.  When the great football games came off he worked himself into a frenzy of excitement over them and even tried to make several of his class teams, though without success.

He chummed with Charlie Geary and with young Dolliver Haight, the two San Francisco boys.  The three were continually together.  They took the same courses, dined at the same table in Memorial Hall and would have shared the same room if it had been possible.  Vandover and Charlie Geary were fortunate enough to get a room in Matthew’s on the lower floor looking out upon the Yard; young Haight was obliged to put up with an outside room in a boarding house.

Vandover had grown up with these fellows and during all his life was thrown in their company.  Haight was a well-bred young boy of good family, very quiet; almost every morning he went to Chapel.  He was always polite, even to his two friends.  He invariably tried to be pleasant and agreeable and had a way of making people like him.  Otherwise, his character was not strongly marked.