"I--I'll be over a little later," said Stover, who did and did not want to go.

Left alone, half angry at his own enforced aloofness, and yet desiring solitude, Stover stood among the litter of boxes and gaping trunks and surveyed the four bare walls that spelled for him the word home.

"It's a bully room--bully," he said to himself with a tender feeling of possession. "The Shad's a bully fellow--bully! Dennis is a corker!

I'm going to make good; see if I don't! But I'm going slow. They've got to come to me. I won't break in until they want me. Gee! What a peach of a room!"

He went to the window and looked out at the whole panorama of the school that ran beneath him, from the long, rakish lines of the Upper, by Memorial Hall, to the chapel and the circle of Houses that ended at the rear with the d.i.c.kinson. Below, boys were streaking across the green depths like water-bugs over limpid surfaces, or hallooing joyfully from window to terrace, greeting one another with bearlike hugs, tumbling about in frolicking heaps. He was on the mountain, they on the plain. His was the imaginative perspective and the troubled vision of one who finds a strange city at his feet.

"It's all there," he said lamely, confused by his own impressions.

"All of it."

"Homesick?" said a thin voice behind him.

He turned to find Finnegan eyeing him uncertainly.

"Why, you wild Irishman," d.i.n.k said, surprised. "Thought you'd gone with the crowd. h.e.l.lo, what's up now?"

Finnegan, with an air of great mystery, locked the door, extracted the key and, returning, enthroned himself on a chair which he had previously planted defiantly on a trunk.

"That's so you can't throw me out."

"Well?"

"I'm going to be fresh as paint."

"You are?" said Stover, mystified and amused.

"Fact," said Finnegan, who, having crossed his legs, plunged his hands into his pockets and c.o.c.ked one eye, said impressively: "d.i.n.k, you're wrong."

"I am--am I?"

"But never mind; I'm here. Dennis de Brian de Boru Finnegan--ready and willing."

"Irishman, I do believe you're embarra.s.sed," said Stover, surprised.

"I'm not," said Finnegan indignantly. "Only--only, I want to be impressive. d.i.n.k, you're getting in wrong again."

"What in thunder----"

"You are, d.i.n.k, you are. But don't worry; I'm here. In the first place, you can't forget what every one else has forgotten."

"Forget what?"

"The late unpleasantness," said Finnegan, with an expelling wave of his hand. "That's over, spiked, dished, set back, covered up, cobwebbed, no flowers and no tombstone."

"I know."

"No, you don't--that's just it. You've got it on your mind--brooding and all that sort of thing."

Stover sat down and stared at the Lilliputian philosopher.

"Well, I like your nerve!"

"Don't--don't start in like that," said Finnegan, rolling up his sleeves over his funny, thin forearms, "cause I shall have to thrash you."

"Well, go on," said Stover suddenly.

"You're not in Coventry--you never have been. You're one of us," said Dennis glibly. "BUT--I repeat BUT--you can't be one of us if you don't believe in your own noddle that you are one of us! Get that? That's deep--no charge, always glad to oblige a customer."

"Keep on," said Stover, leaning back.

"With your kind permission, directly. It's all in this--you haven't got the trick."

"The trick?"

"The trick of conversation. That's not just it. The trick of answering back. Aha, that's better! Scratch out first sentiment. Change signals!"

"There's something in that," said Stover, genuinely amazed.

"You blush."

"What?"

"The word was blush," said Finnegan firmly. "I saw you--Finnegan saw you and grieved. And why? Because you didn't have the trick of answering back."

"Dennis de Brian de Boru Finnegan," said Stover slowly, "I believe you are a whole-hearted little cuss. Also, you're not so far off, either. Now, since this is a serious conversation, this is where I stand: I went through Hades last spring--I deserved it and it's done me good. I've come back to make good. Savez? And that's a serious thing, too. Now if you have one particular theory about your art of conversation to elucidate--eluce."

"One theory!" said Finnegan, chirping along as he perceived the danger-point pa.s.sed. "I'm a theorist, and a real theorist doesn't have one theory; he has dozens. Let me see; let me think, reflect, cogitate, tickle the thinker. Best way is to start at the A, B, C--first principles, all that sort of thing. Supposin', supposin' you come into the room with that hat on--it's a b.u.m hat, by the way--and some one pipes up; 'Get that at the fire sale?' What are you going to answer?"

"Why, I suppose I'd grin," said Stover slowly, "and say: 'How did you guess it?'"

"Wrong," said Finnegan. "You let him take the laugh."

"Well, what?"

"Something in this style: 'Oh, no, I traded it for luck with a squint-eyed, humpbacked biter-off of puppy-dog tails that got it out of Rockefeller's ashcan.' See?"

"No, Dennis, no," said Stover, bewildered. "I see, but there are some things beyond me. Every one isn't a young Shakspere."

"I know," said Finnegan, accepting the tribute without hesitation.

"But there's the principle. You go him one better. You make him look like a chump. You show him what you could have said in his place. That shuts him up, makes him feel foolish, spikes the gun, corks the bottle."

"By Jove!"

"It's what I call the Superiority of the Superlative over the Comparative."

"It sounds simple," said Stover pensively.

"When you know the trick."