- In September of 1910, a young man who appears about twenty years old joins the freshman class at Harvard.
- He neglects to mention that his son just graduated ten years earlier.
- Benjamin immediately gains a prominent position in the class, because he seems older than most of the other boys. He’s also a great football player, on account of his size. He destroys the Yale football team at the annual big game.
- By the end of his four years at Harvard, however, he is smaller than most of the boys in his class and no longer useful on the sports field.
- In 1914, he goes home with his diploma. Hildegarde is away in Italy. Benjamin is now a moody adolescent, and his son Roscoe is married and settled and wants no connection with his scandalous father.
- Benjamin decides to go to St. Midas, a prep school where many of his friends at Harvard had gone. He asks his father to drive him there and enroll him. Roscoe demands that his father stop this process and age the other way at once.