Talbot glanced out at the window and waved his hand at Tracy, who was crossing the yard to the dormitory. “We’re a long way from that yet,” he went on. “We might possibly beat Newbury and Trowbridge in rowing, but we can’t get the cup without football.”
“There’s baseball,” suggested Roger.
“No hope there. What can you expect with a fellow like Stover running things? We never were a baseball school, anyway. It’s the fellows who play on the corner lots that make the baseball players. Our fellows do too much sailing and rowing and playing golf in the summer to have time for baseball practice.”
He rose to leave. “Just go in hard on the football, and don’t give up if you don’t get all the credit you deserve. They have a way here of starting with a team made up on paper and keeping to it through the season; but it’s a bad custom which I want to see broken. I give Dunn about three weeks to talk himself off the field. Then if you don’t get in, it’ll be your own fault.”
The door closed behind the first really sympathetic visitor Roger Hardie had yet received. He had been in school long enough to know that the captain of the crew on the whole outranked any other captain, and that Talbot, in spite of his marked tendency to see the dark spots in the future, and to be over-frank in his criticism, was yet one of the steady-flowing springs of school energy, respected perforce even by those who did not like him. To have Talbot as a friend was to be sure of a stout defender, if not of a persuasive advocate.
Thrilled with gratitude for the attention shown him, his ambition kindling into flame from the spark of hope which Talbot had struck, Roger resolved to show himself worthy of his patron’s favor; he would make something of himself in the school life for the honor of the boy who had befriended him, if such a result lay within the reach of hard work, or patience, or devotion. That making something of himself in the school life meant to him mainly achieving a success in the school athletics, was but natural. We who are older may rightly insist that there are other ways of serving one’s school than by scoring touch-downs or pulling on a winning crew; but a boy cannot be expected to see life through the spectacles of the aged. He must grow through his own ideals, not those of his parents. If his opinion as to the importance of athletics is a fallacy, it is at least a far more wholesome one to hold than many cherished by adults.
Roger held his head higher than usual as he went downstairs to dinner, and in his plain but not unintelligent face the look of stolidity had given place to a brighter expression.
“I was glad to see you playing to-day,” said Mr. Adams, pleasantly. “It seemed to me that you were starting in very well.”
“Thank you,” returned Roger, quietly.
“Didn’t you say you hadn’t played before?” asked Ben Tracy.