Claude usually came out from these lectures with the feeling that the world was full of stimulating things, and that one was fortunate to be alive and to be able to find out about them.  His reading that autumn actually made the future look brighter to him; seemed to promise him something.  One of his chief difficulties had always been that he could not make himself believe in the importance of making money or spending it.  If that were all, then life was not worth the trouble.

The second good thing that had befallen him was that he had got to know some people he liked.  This came about accidentally, after a football game between the Temple eleven and the State University team—­merely a practice game for the latter.  Claude was playing half-back with the Temple.  Toward the close of the first quarter, he followed his interference safely around the right end, dodged a tackle which threatened to end the play, and broke loose for a ninety yard run down the field for a touchdown.  He brought his eleven off with a good showing.  The State men congratulated him warmly, and their coach went so far as to hint that if he ever wanted to make a change, there would be a place for him on the University team.

Claude had a proud moment, but even while Coach Ballinger was talking to him, the Temple students rushed howling from the grandstand, and Annabelle Chapin, ridiculous in a sport suit of her own construction, bedecked with the Temple colours and blowing a child’s horn, positively threw herself upon his neck.  He disengaged himself, not very gently, and stalked grimly away to the dressing shed....  What was the use, if you were always with the wrong crowd?

Julius Erlich, who played quarter on the State team, took him aside and said affably:  “Come home to supper with me tonight, Wheeler, and meet my mother.  Come along with us and dress in the Armory.  You have your clothes in your suitcase, haven’t you?”

“They’re hardly clothes to go visiting in,” Claude replied doubtfully.

“Oh, that doesn’t matter!  We’re all boys at home.  Mother wouldn’t mind if you came in your track things.”

Claude consented before he had time to frighten himself by imagining difficulties.  The Erlich boy often sat next him in the history class, and they had several times talked together.  Hitherto Claude had felt that he “couldn’t make Erlich out,” but this afternoon, while they dressed after their shower, they became good friends, all in a few minutes.  Claude was perhaps less tied-up in mind and body than usual.  He was so astonished at finding himself on easy, confidential terms with Erlich that he scarcely gave a thought to his second-day shirt and his collar with a broken edge,—­wretched economies he had been trained to observe.

They had not walked more than two blocks from the Armory when Julius turned in at a rambling wooden house with an unfenced, terraced lawn.  He led Claude around to the wing, and through a glass door into a big room that was all windows on three sides, above the wainscoting.  The room was full of boys and young men, seated on long divans or perched on the arms of easy chairs, and they were all talking at once.  On one of the couches a young man in a smoking jacket lay reading as composedly as if he were alone.