So impressive was the sudden manifestation of Wallace’s intellectual prowess and so widely heralded the report of it that he was elected into the Pen and Ink Society, an organization of boys with scholarly and literary inclinations. The news of this election, however, he took with bad grace; he declared himself entirely out of sympathy with the purposes of the institution and expressed violently a resolve not to be drafted into the ranks of the “high-brows.” The dejected emissaries of the Pen and Ink had to report to their society that Wallace had declined the election without even seeming sensible of the honor that had been done him, and the popularity that Wallace had achieved suffered somewhat in consequence. Some of the aggrieved members told Ruth Davenport of the slight that had been put on their society, and Ruth, when next she met Wallace, took him to task for it.
“Why,” she asked, “did you want to be so grouchy?”
“I wasn’t grouchy,” Wallace replied, though his manner at the moment might have been so described. “I just felt I didn’t belong in that crowd.”
“You might have shown them you appreciated the honor.”
“Oh, I might have if I’d felt I deserved it.”
“If you’d only said something like that to them!”
“Well, I didn’t deserve it, and I knew it better than they did; and I didn’t want to be bothered.” He looked past Ruth with an expression at once discontented and defiant.
“You’re an awfully funny person.” Ruth’s eyes twinkled and her lips curved into a smile. “You’re so modest that you think you’re not good enough for them, and yet you make them think they’re not good enough for you!”
He did not respond to her gayety, but said in a rather surly voice: “I don’t care what they think. I’m interested in baseball, not in silly scribblings.”