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Free-thinker that this old man was, he was nevertheless a product of the Puritan conscience, and wanted men and women to become pure in heart. As Lanny listened, he began to recall a certain afternoon upon the heights by the church of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Port. His friend Kurt Meissner had not merely voiced the same ethical ideas, but had justified them by the same metaphysical concepts. Lanny mentioned that to the ex-clergyman, who said there was nothing strange about it, because New England transcendentalism had stemmed directly from German philosophical idealism. Interesting to see a son of New England bringing home another load of it, a century later!

Eli bade Lanny have the courage of his vision. Without it men "would be dull clods, and life would become blind greed and empty pleasure-seeking. "God save the Budds if they were never anything but munitions makers and salesmen!" exclaimed Eli; and these words pierced to the center of Lanny's being. When the time came for him to depart, this gentle yet hardy old man gave him a volume of Emerson's, essays inscribed by that great teacher's fine and sensitive hand. Emerson had been merely a name to Lanny; but he promised to read the book, and did so.

V

Lanny drove up to Sand Hill, where St. Thomas's Academy is situated, and took his examinations with success. The fact that the name of Budd was signed to all his papers was not supposed to have anything to do with his passing; nor the fact that one of the school's largest brownstone buildings had been paid for out of the profits which Budd Gunmakers had derived from the American Civil War, and another from the profits of the Spanish-American War. St. Thomas's was a part of the Budd tradition; and the family's right to send its sons there was hereditary. Lanny asked his father about the matter of his not being quite properly a Budd, and Robbie said he had entered him as his son, and that was that; it wasn't the custom to send over to France for marriage certificates.

The beautiful old buildings stood in a park having lawns and shade trees like an English estate. They were of dull old red brick with Boston ivy on the walls, making a safe home for millions of spiders and bugs. In one of the dormitories Lanny shared a comfortable room and bath with a cousin whom he had met on the tennis courts, but with whom he had little else in common.

Lanny had played with boys, but always a few at a time; he had never before been part of a horde. He discovered that a horde is something different, a being with a personality of its own. Being young and eager, he was curious about it, and every hour was a fresh adventure. He awoke to the ringing of an electric bell, went to breakfast to another ringing, and thereafter moved through the day as an electrically controlled robot. He acquired knowledge in weighed and measured portions; memorized facts and recited them, forgot many of them until the end of the month, relearned them for a "test," forgot them again until the end of a term, relearned them once more for "exam" - and then forgot them forever and ever, amen.

In addition to this part of his life, scheduled and ordained by the school authorities, the horde had its own life which it lived during off hours. This life centered upon three things: athletic prowess, class politics, and sex. If you could run, jump, or play football or baseball, your success was probable; if you could talk realistically about girls, that would help; if your family was notably rich and famous, and if you had Anglo-Saxon features, good clothes, and easy manners, all problems were solved. Entering the third year, Lanny was jumping into the midst of school politics, and had to be looked over and judged quickly. His cousin, belonging to a fashionable set, was ready to initiate him, and would be provoked if Lanny didn't display proper respect for the fine points upon which his friends based their judgments. "Be careful, or they'll set you down for a 'queerie,' " said this mentor.

VI

Robbie had asked Lanny not to play football, saying that he was too lightly built for this rough game. It was another of those cases in which the father expected him to be wiser than himself. Robbie didn't want Lanny to smoke or drink. He was willing for him to have a girl now and then, but wanted him to be "choosy" about it. He had wished Lanny to attend his grandfather's Bible class and his stepmother's church - even though Robbie himself wouldn't do it, and paid a price for refusing. All this was hard to fathom.

As it happened, Lanny could run, and liked to, and he was a good tennis player, so he would never be entirely a "queerie." But he had many handicaps to success at St. Thomas's. He had just come from abroad, and that made him an object of curiosity. He pronounced French correctly, which could only be taken as an affectation. He had read a great many books, and his masters discovered this fact and brought it out in class, hoping to waken a desire for culture in these "young barbarians all at play." That was hard on Lanny.

His first disillusionment came with the discovery that class sessions at St. Thomas's were rather dull. They consisted mainly of the recitation of lessons studied the night before, and if you had studied well, you were bored listening to other fellows who had studied badly, and you were only mildly entertained by their efforts to "get by" with a wisecrack. Rarely was there any intelligent discussion in class; rarely anything taught about which either masters or pupils were deeply concerned. They were preparing for college, and all instruction was aimed like a gun at a target; they learned names, dates, theorems, verb forms, rules, and exceptions - everything definite and specific, that could be measured and counted.

Lanny found that he was expected to assemble now and then with his cousin's "set." These were called "bull sessions," and there would be some talk about the prospects of beating Groton or St. Paul's at football, and some about the wire-pulling of a rival set; but sooner or later the talk would turn to sex. Lanny was no Puritan - on the contrary, he was here to study the Puritans; and what troubled him was that the element of mutuality or idealism appeared to be lacking in their relations with girls. Shrewd and observant young men of the world, they knew how to deal with "gold diggers," "salamanders," and other deadly females of the species. Both boys and girls appeared to regard the love market as they would later in life the stock market - a place where you got something for nothing.

One of the characteristics of the horde is that it does not allow you to be different; it persecutes those who do not conform to its ideas and obey its taboos. There was a sensitive younger lad named Benny Cartright, whose father was a well-known portrait painter; he found out that Lanny was interested in this subject, and would cling to him and ask yearning questions about the art world abroad. There was a son of Mrs. Bascome, well-known suffrage lecturer; this youth wore horn-rimmed spectacles and was opposed to war on principle. More than a year ago Robbie had told his son about the secret treaties of the Allies, in which they had distributed the spoils of war among themselves; now these treaties were published in the New York Evening Post, and this chap Bascome brought them to Lanny in the form of a pamphlet.

. So, despite his cousin's warnings, Lanny became more queer, and this was in due course reported back to the family. The grown-ups also were a horde, and watched the young and spied upon them - just as the masters in this school were expected to do. St. Thomas's had a "rule book," and your attention would be called to section nine, paragraph six; if you disregarded the warning, attention would be called more sternly, and if a third warning had no effect, you might be "sequestered."

Among the masters at St. Thomas's was one who taught English, a slender and ascetic young man who was trying to write poetry in his off hours. By accident he discovered that Lanny had not merely read the Greek dramatists but had visited that country. They talked about it after class, and from this developed a liking, and Lanny was invited to the master's room on several occasions. This was a form of queerness with which the horde had never before had to deal, and they didn't know quite what to make of it. They applied to it a rather awful term out of their varied assortment of slang; they said that Budd was "sucking up to" the somewhat pathetic Mr. Algernon Baldwin - who got only eight hundred dollars a year for his earnest labors in this school, and had an invalid mother to take care of.