and at the final convocation he drew a crowd of more than seven hundred, a very singular and unprecedented occurrence. He had to admit to himself that he had not done badly; four years in the service might have cut him entirely adrift, or it might have had the opposite effect of driving him to the close security of an assistant professorship, both shelter and retreat and a certain amount of dignity too; but he had resisted more successfully than some of his colleagues. He had written and published a book, and he was well on his way with the second one now. To go it alone required more courage than anything he had faced during the war, but he had managed and he would manage, and there was not only relief but a wonderful sense of freedom in the thought that tomorrow he would be returning to New York, to the complicated and variegated world where anything could and did happen. The sense of excitement he experienced whenever he undertook even a minor variation in the course of his life was something he would not willingly surrender; and all things taken together he was, he felt, about as happy as a man could be in these troubled and perturbed United States.
