He had decided that he would not spend
any more time at the University but would devote himself entirely to
the study of law. Several young men came in.
Among the students at the University McGregor had seemed very old.
Secretly he was much admired and had often been the subject of talk.
Those who had now come to see him wanted him to join a Greek Letter
Fraternity. They sat about his room, on the window sill and on a trunk
by the wall. They smoked pipes and were boyishly eager and
enthusiastic. A glow shone in the cheeks of the spokesman--a clean-
looking youth with black curly hair and round pink--and--white cheeks,
the son of a Presbyterian minister from Iowa.
"You have been picked by our fellows to be one of us," said the
spokesman. "We want you to become an Alpha Beta Pi. It is a grand
fraternity with chapters in the best schools in the country. Let me
tell you."
He began reeling off a list of names of statesmen, college professors,
business men and well known athletes who belonged to the order.
McGregor sat by the wall looking at his guests and wondering what he
would say. He was a little amused and half hurt and felt like a man
who has had a Sunday School scholar stop him on the street to ask him
about the welfare of his soul. He thought of Edith Carson waiting for
him in her store on Monroe Street, of the angry miners standing in the
saloon in Coal Creek plotting to break into the restaurant while he
sat with the hammer in his hands waiting for battle, of old Mother
Misery walking at the heels of the soldiers' horses through the
streets of the mining village, and last of all of the terrible
certainty that these bright-eyed boys would be destroyed, swallowed up
by the huge commercial city in which they were to live.
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