"Ever played?" asked the scrub quarter.
"Yes," said Neale. He did not feel obliged to tell how little.
"What position?"
"Half-back," he lied brazenly, having made up his mind that he hadn't the weight to aspire to the Varsity line.
They ran through signals. Then a scrimmage started but Neale was not in the line-up. A scrub back had his wind knocked out and didn't get up quickly enough for the coach. "Put in that Freshman bean-pole. Jump in, what's your name?"
Neale jumped and floundered for five minutes, then the peppery scrub quarter consigned him profanely to the side-lines. For two days after that he moped without a job, although still in a suit, out in the field. Then he had another trial.
Gradually he made sure of his place as right-half on the scrub—not that he was any good, as they told him plainly: but because in those days the whole squad, including hopeless dubs, seldom numbered over thirty men, and thanks to the work in the mill at West Adams, Neale was physically fit.
With this place, minor though it was, came the great privilege of dinner, after practice, at the football house. There he picked up a little of the theory of the game from the blackboard talks; there after the Pennsylvania's guards-back had battered through for thirty points, he heard the coach, white and shaking with emotion, pour out his biting post-mortem. "You, Jackson," shaking his fore-finger at the left-guard, "did you shoot your body in low and spill them in their own territory? No, you Stood Up!"
Neale's flesh crept, he was almost glad that he had escaped the fearful responsibility of being on the Varsity. It was terrible, such a weight on your shoulders. He shrank from it, and with all his being, aspired to it.
He made no impression on the football world, but his own interior world was transformed. He was no longer an isolated, formless Freshman, dumped down into the midst of the most callously laissez-faire of Universities, he was no more a forgotten molecule with no share in, or responsibility for the ultimate reaction. He had a shelter for his personality against the vast, daunting indifference of the universe. He was on the football squad.