“The rector’s daughter—Ruth Davenport. Peach, isn’t she?”
“Yes, peach,” said David.
He continued to look on until the ringing of the quarter bell for luncheon put an end to the game.
CHAPTER III
HOSTILITIES
Afterwards, looking back upon those early days at St. Timothy’s, David sometimes wondered whether he had possessed any individuality whatever. It seemed to him that he had been merely a submerged unit that had brief periods of consciousness,—of homesickness, of pleasure, of suffering,—but that for the most part was swept along on its curiously insensate way. He remembered the sharpness of contrast between the day when he first saw St. Timothy’s and the day when the school formally opened—the quiet, depopulated aspect of one and the bustling and populous activity of the other. From that opening day life seemed to flow in currents all about him and to drag him on with it, passive, bewildered sometimes, sometimes struggling, sometimes swimming blithely, but always in a current that bore him on and on. Each morning it began, with the streams of boys flowing at the same hour toward the same spot, from the dormitories to the chapel; then from the chapel to the schoolroom; finally from the schoolroom back to the dormitories again; afterwards to the playgrounds, where they trickled off into a lot of separate bubbling little springs, only to be sluiced together again at the distant ringing of a bell and sent streaming back to the school.
Gradually David made friends; gradually, too, he came into hostile relations with certain fellows. Chief among his friends was another new boy and fifth-former, Clarence Monroe, whom he sat next to at table. They were, as it happened, the only new boys at that table, and their newness might of itself have bound them together. But they quickly discovered sympathetic qualities—love of reading and of the same authors, keenness for baseball and for track athletics, and, in the circumstances most uniting of all, kindred antipathies. For the sixth-formers at the table, of whom there were several, seemed to feel that their sanctity was invaded by the two “new kids” and were disposed to be offish and censorious. One of them in particular, Hubert Henshaw, who sat opposite David, made himself disagreeable. He was apparently a leader in certain ways.
“The glass of fashion and the mould of form,” commented Monroe satirically to David. They were reading Shakespeare in the English class, and David replied:
“Yes, perfumed like a milliner. I think it’s all right for a fellow to keep anything up his sleeve except his handkerchief.”
“I always feel there’s something wrong with a fellow that always has his socks match his necktie,” said Monroe.