“Yes; that’s terrible,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer, with the abstractly severe yet personally pitying perception of one whose every word and act was sincere and direct.  “I know just what you mean.  But how does it apply to Mr. Mavering?”

“It doesn’t, exactly,” returned her friend.  “And I’m always ashamed when I say, or even think, anything against Dan Mavering.  He’s sweetness itself.  We’ve known him ever since he came to Harvard, and I must say that a more constant and lovely follow I never saw.  It wasn’t merely when he was a Freshman, and he had that home feeling hanging about him still that makes all the Freshmen so appreciative of anything you do for them; but all through the Sophomore and Junior years, when they’re so taken up with their athletics and their societies and their college life generally that they haven’t a moment for people that have been kind to them, he was just as faithful as ever.”

“How nice!” cried Mrs. Pasmer.

Yes, indeed!  And all the allurements of Boston society haven’t taken him from us altogether.  You can’t imagine how much this means till you’ve been at home a while and seen how the students are petted and spoiled nowadays in the young society.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of it,” said Mrs. Pasmer.  “And is it his versatility and brilliancy, or his amiability, that makes him such a universal favourite?”

“Universal favourite?  I don’t know that he’s that.”

“Well, popular, then.”

“Oh, he’s certainly very much liked.  But, Jenny, there are no universal favourites in Harvard now, if there ever were:  the classes are altogether too big.  And it wouldn’t be ability, and it wouldn’t be amiability alone, that would give a man any sort of leadership.”

“What in the world would it be?”

“That question, more than anything else, shows how long you’ve been away, Jenny.  It would be family—­family, with a judicious mixture of the others, and with money.”

“Is it possible?  But of course—­I remember!  Only at their age one thinks of students as being all hail-fellow-well-met with each other—­”

“Yes; it’s hard to realise how conventional they are—­how very much worldlier than the world—­till one sees it as one does in Cambridge.  They pique themselves on it.  And Mr. Saintsbury”—­she was one of those women whom everything reminds of their husbands “says that it isn’t a bad thing altogether.  He says that Harvard is just like the world; and even if it’s a little more so, these boys have got to live in the world, and they had better know what it is.  You may not approve of the Harvard spirit, and Mr. Saintsbury doesn’t sympathise with it; he only says it’s the world’s spirit.  Harvard men—­the swells—­are far more exclusive than Oxford men.  A student, ‘comme il faut’, wouldn’t at all like to be supposed to know another student whom we valued for his brilliancy, unless he was popular and well known in college.”