another pair of checked pants in Lincoln.  He hung his new clothes up in his closet and never put them on again, though Annabelle Chapin watched for them wistfully.  Nevertheless, Claude thought he could recognize a well-dressed man when he saw one.  He even thought he could recognize a well-dressed woman.  If an attractive woman got into the street car when he was on his way to or from Temple Place, he was distracted between the desire to look at her and the wish to seem indifferent.

Claude is on his way back to Lincoln, with a fairly liberal allowance which does not contribute much to his comfort or pleasure.  He has no friends or instructors whom he can regard with admiration, though the need to admire is just now uppermost in his nature.  He is convinced that the people who might mean something to him will always misjudge him and pass him by.  He is not so much afraid of loneliness as he is of accepting cheap substitutes; of making excuses to himself for a teacher who flatters him, of waking up some morning to find himself admiring a girl merely because she is accessible.  He has a dread of easy compromises, and he is terribly afraid of being fooled.

VI

Three months later, on a grey December day, Claude was seated in the passenger coach of an accommodation freight train, going home for the holidays.  He had a pile of books on the seat beside him and was reading, when the train stopped with a jerk that sent the volumes tumbling to the floor.  He picked them up and looked at his watch.  It was noon.  The freight would lie here for an hour or more, until the east-bound passenger went by.  Claude left the car and walked slowly up the platform toward the station.  A bundle of little spruce trees had been flung off near the freight office, and sent a smell of Christmas into the cold air.  A few drays stood about, the horses blanketed.  The steam from the locomotive made a spreading, deep-violet stain as it curled up against the grey sky.

Claude went into a restaurant across the street and ordered an oyster stew.  The proprietress, a plump little German woman with a frizzed bang, always remembered him from trip to trip.  While he was eating his oysters she told him that she had just finished roasting a chicken with sweet potatoes, and if he liked he could have the first brown cut off the breast before the train-men came in for dinner.  Asking her to bring it along, he waited, sitting on a stool, his boots on the lead-pipe foot-rest, his elbows on the shiny brown counter, staring at a pyramid of tough looking bun-sandwiches under a glass globe.

“I been lookin’ for you every day,” said Mrs. Voigt when she brought his plate.  “I put plenty good gravy on dem sweet pertaters, ja.”

“Thank you.  You must be popular with your boarders.”

She giggled.  “Ja, all de train men is friends mit me.  Sometimes dey bring me a liddle Schweizerkase from one of dem big saloons in Omaha what de Cherman beobles batronize.  I ain’t got no boys mein own self, so I got to fix up liddle tings for dem boys, eh?”