While the freight train was puffing slowly across the winter country, leaving a black trail suspended in the still air, Claude went over that experience minutely in his mind, as if he feared to lose something of it on approaching home.  He could remember exactly how Mrs. Erlich and the boys had looked to him on that first night, could repeat almost word for word the conversation which had been so novel to him.  Then he had supposed the Erlichs were rich people, but he found out afterwards that they were poor.  The father was dead, and all the boys had to work, even those who were still in school.  They merely knew how to live, he discovered, and spent their money on themselves, instead of on machines to do the work and machines to entertain people.  Machines, Claude decided, could not make pleasure, whatever else they could do.  They could not make agreeable people, either.  In so far as he could see, the latter were made by judicious indulgence in almost everything he had been taught to shun.

Since that first visit, he had gone to the Erlichs’, not as often as he wished, certainly, but as often as he dared.  Some of the University boys seemed to drop in there whenever they felt like it, were almost members of the family; but they were better looking than he, and better company.  To be sure, long Baumgartner was an intimate of the house, and he was a gawky boy with big red hands and patched shoes; but he could at least speak German to the mother, and he played the piano, and seemed to know a great deal about music.

Claude didn’t wish to be a bore.  Sometimes in the evening, when he left the Library to smoke a cigar, he walked slowly past the Erlichs’ house, looking at the lighted windows of the sitting-room and wondering what was going on inside.  Before he went there to call, he racked his brain for things to talk about.  If there had been a football game, or a good play at the theatre, that helped, of course.

Almost without realizing what he was doing, he tried to think things out and to justify his opinions to himself, so that he would have something to say when the Erlich boys questioned him.  He had grown up with the conviction that it was beneath his dignity to explain himself, just as it was to dress carefully, or to be caught taking pains about anything.  Ernest was the only person he knew who tried to state clearly just why he believed this or that; and people at home thought him very conceited and foreign.  It wasn’t American to explain yourself; you didn’t have to!  On the farm you said you would or you wouldn’t; that Roosevelt was all right, or that he was crazy.  You weren’t supposed to say more unless you were a stump speaker,—­if you tried to say more, it was because you liked to hear yourself talk.  Since you never said anything, you didn’t form the habit of thinking.  If you got too much bored, you went to town and bought something new.