Geary was quite different.  He never could forget himself.  He was incessantly talking about what he had done or was going to do.  In the morning he would inform Vandover of how many hours he had slept and of the dreams he had dreamed.  In the evening he would tell him everything he had done that day; the things he had said, how many lectures he had cut, what brilliant recitations he had made, and even what food he had eaten at Memorial.  He was pushing, self-confident, very shrewd and clever, devoured with an inordinate ambition and particularly pleased when he could get the better of anybody, even of Vandover or of young Haight.  He delighted to assume the management of things.  Vandover, he made his protege, taking over the charge of such business as the two had in common.  It was he who had found the room in Matthew’s, getting it away from all other applicants, securing it at the eleventh hour.  He put Vandover’s name on the waiting list at Memorial, saw that he filled out his blanks at the proper time, helped him balance his accounts, guided him in the choice of his courses and in the making out of his study-card.

“Look here, Charlie,” Vandover would exclaim, throwing down the Announcement of Courses, “I can’t make this thing out.  It’s all in a tangle.  See here, I’ve got to fill up my hours some way or other; you straighten this thing out for me.  Find me some nice little course, two hours a week, say, that comes late in the morning, a good hour after breakfast; something easy, all lectures, no outside reading, nice instructor and all that.”  And Geary would glance over the complicated schedule, cleverly untangling it at once and would find two or three such courses as Vandover desired.

Vandover’s yielding disposition led him to submit to Geary’s dictatorship and he thus early began to contract easy, irresponsible habits, becoming indolent, shirking his duty whenever he could, sure that Geary would think for the two and pull him out of any difficulty into which he might drift.

Otherwise the three freshmen were very much alike.  They were hardly more than boys and full of boyish spirits and activity.  They began to see “college life.”  Vandover was already smoking; pretty soon he began to drink.  He affected beer, whisky he loathed, and such wine as was not too expensive was either too sweet or too sour.  It became a custom for the three to go into town two or three nights in the week and have beer and Welsh rabbits at Billy Park’s.  On these occasions, however, young Haight drank only beer, he never touched wine or spirits.

It was in Billy Park’s the evening after the football game between the Yale and Harvard freshmen that Vandover was drunk for the first time.  He was not so drunk but that he knew he was, and the knowledge of the fact so terrified him that it kept him from getting very bad.  The first sensation soon wore off, and by the time that Geary took charge of him and brought him back to Cambridge he was disposed to treat the affair less seriously.  Nevertheless when he got to his room he looked at himself in the mirror a long time, saying to himself over and over again, “I’m drunk—­just regularly drunk.  Good Heavens! what would the governor say to this?”