It was not only the books into which he had been dipping that told him of his need. Every word, every allusion caught at the Eaglewood lunch table had opened new vistas of conjecture. Of course each human agglomeration, down to the smallest village, had its local idioms, its own range of allusions, its stock of jokes and forms of irony. At the Tracys', for instance, you heard the Paul's Landing vernacular, as you heard that of Euphoria at Vance's family table; but all that was different. Vance had known instantly that the language, the intonations, the allusions of Eaglewood did not belong peculiarly to Paul's Landing, were indeed hardly concerned with it, but embraced, though so lightly flitting, great areas extending not only to New York and beyond, but backward through this mysterious past which was so much newer to Vance than any present. These easy affable people could talk—did talk—about everything! Everything, that is, but the exclusively local matters which had formed the staple of the only conversation Vance had ever heard. What they talked of was simply all the rest; and he could see that they did it without the least intention of showing-off, the least consciousness that their scope was wider than other people's—did it naturally, carelessly, just as his mother talked about electric cookers, his father about local real estate, Mrs. Tracy about Laura Lou's school picnics and Upton's job at the nursery. The inference was, not that the Spears and their friends were an isolated group, parading their superior attainments before each other, but that they belonged to a class, a society, a type of people, who naturally breathed this larger air, possessed this privilege of moving freely backward and forward in time and space, and were so used to it all that they took the same faculty for granted in others—even in a boy like Vance Weston.

Well, there was no reason why a boy like Vance Weston shouldn't, some day or other, acquire a like faculty. He had been brought up in the creed that there was nothing a fellow from Euphoria, the cradle of all the Advantages, couldn't attain to. Only—how? It seemed to him that the gulf was untraversable. If only he could have been left alone in that library, left there for half a year, perhaps… . But even so, he felt that he needed some kind of tuition to prepare him for the library. The Past was too big, too complicated, too aloof, to surrender its secrets so lightly.

College again? College meant to him sports and more sports, secret societies, class scraps and fraternity rushing, with restricted intervals of mechanical cramming, and the glib unmeaning recital of formulas—his courses provided a formula for everything! But all that had nothing to do with all this… .