So he went to
Harvard--there was no other logical thing to be done with him.
Oblivious to the social system, he lived for a while alone and unsought
in a high room in Beck Hall--a slim dark boy of medium height with a shy
sensitive mouth. His allowance was more than liberal. He laid the
foundations for a library by purchasing from a wandering bibliophile
first editions of Swinburne, Meredith, and Hardy, and a yellowed
illegible autograph letter of Keats's, finding later that he had been
amazingly overcharged. He became an exquisite dandy, amassed a rather
pathetic collection of silk pajamas, brocaded dressing-gowns, and
neckties too flamboyant to wear; in this secret finery he would parade
before a mirror in his room or lie stretched in satin along his
window-seat looking down on the yard and realizing dimly this clamor,
breathless and immediate, in which it seemed he was never to have
a part.
Curiously enough he found in senior year that he had acquired a position
in his class. He learned that he was looked upon as a rather romantic
figure, a scholar, a recluse, a tower of erudition. This amused him but
secretly pleased him--he began going out, at first a little and then a
great deal.
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