These athletic officials thought that this would be narrow-minded in him, and they were giving him a very good time. The way they did it was not by treating him as a distinguished guest or by telling him what a fine fellow he was, which would have turned the little boy's head and have made him think he could do as he pleased. They simply said "Come," and when he came, let him walk around with them.
For they were a right conceited lot in regard to their college, and thought that all they had to do was put a boy on the campus, let him use his eyes and breathe the air and get it in his young system, and his good sense would do the rest. If it did not, his sense was not good and they did not want him, thought they.
As for the young pitcher, he did not quite understand why these great and awful men whom he had often heard of were so kind to him, and he did not care. He only opened his eyes and ears and shut his mouth, and let his friends do whatever they wanted with him and thought it was very nice in them.
And that is all I am going to tell of; what Symington the prep. drank in with his eyes and ears open and his mouth closed. Nothing will happen.
A lame arm had laid him off his team for the usual Saturday game, so he had arrived in Princeton this afternoon in time to see the 'varsity play with a small college nine. He watched the game critically and closely, and passed judgment on each player—under his breath.
He knew the initials, age, class, and previous history of every man on the team, and he could have told you just what each one did and did not in the seventh inning of the Yale game two years before. In regard to the important games previous to that he was somewhat hazy. He was only sure of the scores by innings, the total base hits, and the errors, though he hated to confess it.
Tucker, the Base-ball president, had honored him to the extent of allowing him to sit on the bench under the canopy with the team. Here was a splendid opportunity of gazing upon their faces at close range. Once when the third baseman came in breathless from a home run, with perspiration running down his face, he tripped on Symington's toe and said to him in a loud tone, in order to be heard above the applause, "Pardon me, Symington," which Charlie did.
After the game, which was of the subdued, half-holiday recreation sort, good to bring either a pipe or a girl to, without fear of putting either out by inattention, Tucker, the president, brought him up the street and through the noisy quadrangle to Reunion Hall where he now was ascending the stairs.
Tucker opened the door and picked up a dozen or more letters from the floor and said, "Sit down, Charlie," and began to assort them.
But he said "Sit down Charlie" in an absent-minded tone, and Charlie knew that, and so he looked about the room instead. He thought this was the kind of a room a college man ought to have. He gazed at everything in it from the oar of the last Princeton crew (which must have rowed in triremes—there are two hundred and nine of those oars) to the small photograph of a girl's face in a dainty little figured blue silk frame, all alone over Tucker's desk. That was the first thing he had discovered of which he could not approve. It grieved him to be obliged to think that of Tucker. He seemed such a fine fellow, too.