There came and sat beside him Tom French, his handsome face vested in the hard insolence of money.
He was followed by his court jester, Roy Duncan, the slave with the high hard cackle.
“Hello, Gant,” said Tom French harshly.
“Been to Exeter lately?”
Scowling, he winked at grinning Roy.
“Yes,” said Eugene,
“I’ve been there lately, and I’m on my way there now.
What’s it to you, French?”
Discomfited by this hard defiance, the rich man’s son drew back.
“We hear you’re stepping out among them, ‘Gene,” said Roy Duncan, cackling.
“Who’s we?” said Eugene.
“Who’s them?”
“They say,” said Tom French, “that you’re as pure as the flowing sewer.”
“If I need cleaning,” said Eugene, “I can always use the Gold Dust Twins, can’t I?
French and Duncan, the Gold Dust Twins — who never do any work.”
The cluster of grinning students, the young impartial brutes who had gathered about them on the seats back and front, laughed loudly.
“That’s right!
That’s right!
Talk to them, ‘Gene!” said Zeno Cochran, softly.
He was a tall lad of twenty, slender and powerful, with the grace of a running horse.
He had punted against the wind for eighty yards in the Yale Bowl.
He was a handsome fellow, soft-spoken and kindly, with the fearless gentleness of the athlete.
Confused and angry, with sullen boastfulness, Tom French said:
“Nobody has anything on me.
I’ve been too slick for them.
Nobody knows anything about me.”
“You mean,” said Eugene, “that every one knows all about you, and nobody wants to know anything about you.”
The crowd laughed.
“Wow!” said Jimmy Revell.
“What about that, Tom?” he asked challengingly.
He was very small and plump, the son of a carpenter, offensively worthy, working his way through college by various schemes.
He was a “kidder,” an egger-on, finding excuse for his vulgarity and malice in a false and loud good-humor.
Eugene turned quietly on Tom French.
“Stop it!” he said.
“Don’t go on because the others are listening.
I don’t think it’s funny.
I don’t like it.
I don’t like you.
I want you to leave me alone now.
Do you hear?”
“Come on,” said Roy Duncan, rising, “leave him alone, Tom.
He can’t take a joke.
He takes things too seriously.”
They left him.
Unperturbed, relieved, he turned his face toward the vast bleak earth, gray and hoary in the iron grip of winter.
Winter ended.
The sleety frozen earth began to soften under thaw and the rain.
The town and campus paths were dreary trenches of mud and slime.
The cold rain fell: the grass shot up in green wet patches.
He hurtled down the campus lanes, bounding like a kangaroo, leaping high at the lower boughs to clip a budding twig with his teeth.