Somehow the cry that went up took from Dink all the sting of defeat. He went out, head erect, back to meet his college, no longer shrinking from the ordeal, proud of his captain, proud of his coach, and proud of a lesson he had learned bigger than a victory.
CHAPTER XI
After the drudgery of the football season he had a few short weeks of gorgeous idleness, during which he browsed through a novel a day, curled up on his window-seat, rolling tobacco clouds through the fog of smokers in the room. He had won his spurs and the right to lounge, and he looked forward eagerly to the rest of the year as a time for reading and the opening up of the friendships of which he had dreamed.
Old age settled down rapidly upon him, and at eighteen that malady appears in its most virulent form. Perhaps there was a little justification. The test he had gone through had educated him to self-control in its most difficult form. He was not simply the big man of the class, the first to emerge to fame, but the prospective captain of a future Yale eleven. A certain gravity was requisite—moreover, it was due the University. To have seen the burning letters S-T-O-V-E-R actually vibrating on the front pages of metropolitan papers, to have gazed on his distinguished (though slightly smudged) features, ruined by an unfeeling photographer, but disputing nevertheless the public attention with statesmen and champions of the pugilistic ring—to have felt these heavenly sensations at the age of eighteen could not be lightly disguised.
So he lay back among welcome cushions, book in hand, and listened with a tolerant ear to the rapid-fire comedy of McNab and Buck Waters. He stayed much in his own room, which became a sort of lounging spot where the air was always blue with smoke and a mandolin or guitar was strumming a low refrain or a group near the fireplace was noisy with the hazards of the national game.
Pretty much every one of importance in the class dropped in on him. The preliminary visiting period of the sophomore societies was nearly over. With the opening of the winter term the hold-offs and elections would begin. He understood that those who were uncertain wished the advantage of being seen in his company—that his, in fact, was now the "right" crowd.
He intended to call on several men who interested him: Brockhurst, who had made his appearance with a story in the Lit which announced him as a possible future chairman; Gimbel, about whose opinions and sincerity he was in doubt; and, above all, Regan, who genuinely attracted him. But, somehow, having now nothing to do, his afternoons and evenings seemed always filled, and he continually postponed until the morrow what suggested itself during the day. Besides, there was a complacent delight in being his own master again and of looking forward to such a period of independent languor.
The first discordant note to intrude itself upon this ideal was a remark of Le Baron's during one of the evening visits. These embassies were always conducted with punctiliousness and gravity. The inquisitorial sophomores arrived about eight o'clock in groups of three and four. As McCarthy was the object of attention from a different society, Stover, when the former's inspectors arrived, shook hands gravely, and shortly discovered that he had a letter to post at the corner. When the committee on Stover appeared trimly at the door, McCarthy rose at once to return a hypothetical book, after which the conversation began with about as much spontaneity and zest as would be permitted to a board of alienists sitting in judgment on a victim. The sophomores were embarrassed with their own impromptu dignity, and the freshmen at the constraint of their superiors.