St. James still traded positions in the top five year after year, but the era when the school had without a second thought moved back that chapel wall was far gone. St. James’s carrying costs were much higher than those of most colleges, they had extended more and more financial aid to try to diversify the student body, and the St. James endowment was healthy but somewhat sleepily managed. Several other schools were making savvy investments in technology and energy and had alumni who had prospered in the mid-nineties economy, and those schools had been able to build planetariums and concert halls and dorm rooms with duplex living spaces. In 1950, sixty percent of all students who applied to Ivy League schools got in; now it was closer to ten percent and only getting tougher. For the previous two years, St. James had had an uncomfortable admissions season.

It was exactly this combination—scandal and slippage—that had eroded other schools just as prominent as St. James was now. The new Rector, David Aston, had been brought in from a California boarding school founded in 1980 by an Andover alum. The board sensed that St. James was far from invulnerable, and so they needed Aston to inject the vigor and historylessness of the West Coast, with Phelps providing East Coast ballast.

Sometimes scandals made alumni feel embattled, galvanized, could in fact stoke their loyalty to a school. But Phelps had no appetite for risk. And most of all he didn’t want a scandal to distract from what he saw as his slightly subversive mission to fold some kernel of idealism into these students before the world heaped them with wealth and position. Society thought that places like St. James created unfairness, and of course that was true, but Phelps saw himself as a laborer in the vineyard, and he and many of his fellow teachers took seriously the task of creating ethical leaders. So to preserve the good he thought St. James could accomplish, Phelps was in the unfamiliar position of needing a certain outcome.

Phelps stayed quiet and looked at Ben. The other adults stayed quiet. Ben felt an urge to fill the silence, but then he realized that Phelps was creating this silence to make him say something, and so Ben settled back to wait, and Phelps seemed to know this immediately and cleared his throat to speak.

“You want to protect the older kids. I understand that. But who’s protecting the other new students? What if something had gone wrong down there? What happens when it goes wrong next time? That’s what you have to think about, Ben. If something goes wrong next time and you could have prevented it, how are you going to feel?”

Even though Ben was still enjoying his intangible advantage, it now seemed slight, and he felt guilty, exactly as he knew Phelps wanted him to feel.

“I’ll let you know if I hear about anything like that.”