Marty picked up the card of invitation which J.W. had flipped across the table to him, and read it.

“Well,” he commented, “it reads all right.  Let’s try it.”

Out into the rain they went and put in two highly cheerful hours, including one in the devotional meeting, so that when Marty at last sat down to write home, he produced, without quite knowing how, a letter that was vastly more heartening when it reached the farm than it would have been if he had written it before dark.

Joe Carbrook set out for the State University in what was for him a fashion quite subdued.  Before his experience at the Institute he would have gone, if at all, in his own car, and his arrival would have been notice to “the sporty crowd” that another candidate for initiation into that select circle had arrived.

But Joe was enjoying the novelty of thinking a little before he acted.  Though he would always be of the irrepressible sort, he was not the same Joe.  He had laid out a program which surprised himself somewhat, and astonished most of the people who knew him.

He knew now that he would become, if he could, a doctor; a missionary doctor.  No other career entered his mind.  He would finish his college work at the State University, and then go to medical school.  He would devote himself without ceasing to all the studies he would need.  Not for him any social life, any relaxation of purpose.  Grimly he told himself that his play days were over.  They had been lively while they lasted; but they were done.

Of course that was foolish.  If he had persisted in any such scholastic regimen, the effort would have lasted a few days, or possibly weeks; and then in a reaction of disgust he might easily have come to despair of the whole project.

Fortunately for Joe and for a good many other people, his purpose of digging into his books and laboratory work and doggedly avoiding any other interest was tempered by the happenings of the first week.  Doubtless he would have made a desperate struggle, but it would have been useless.  Not even conversion can make new habits overnight, and in his first two years at college Joe had been known to teachers and students alike as distinctly a sketchy student, wholly inexpert at concentrated effort.

And so, instead of becoming first a grind and then a discouraged rebel against it all, he had the immense good fortune to be captured by an observant Junior whom he had met while they were both registering for Chemistry III.

“You’re new here,” said the Junior, Heatherby by name, “and I’ve had two years of it.  Maybe you’ll let me show you the place.  I’m the proud half-owner of a decidedly second-hand ‘Hooting Nanny,’ you know, and I rather like bumping people around town in it.”

That was the beginning of many things.  Joe liked it that Heatherby made no apologies for his car, and before long he discovered that the other half-owner, Barnard, was equally unaffected and friendly.  It was something of a surprise, though, to learn that Barnard was not a student, but the youthful-looking pastor of the University Methodist Church, of late known as the Wesley Foundation.