"Yes, and Hunter will go in with sailing colors; he'll never risk anything," he said bitterly, "and I'll stand up and take my medicine, for doing what? For showing I had a backbone. But no one will ever know it outside. They'll think it's something wrong in my character—they always do. Stover, Yale's star end, misses out for Bones! That's the slogan. Cheating at cards or bumming. I wonder what she'll think? Lord, that's the hard part!"
For a week, proud as Lucifer, on edge for an opportunity, he stuck it out at the eating-joint, knowing the hopelessness of it all—that what he wanted had gone, and no amount of bravado could make him wink the fact, that in the midst of his own crowd, where he had stood as a leader, he was now regarded as an outsider.
In the second week he gave up the useless fight, and went to Commons, to the table where Regan, Gimbel, and Brockhurst ate. They forebore to ask him the reasons of the change, and he gave no explanation. That something had happened which had caused him to break away from his society was soon a matter of common rumor, and several incorrect versions circulated, all vastly to his credit. His influence in the body of the class was correspondingly increased, and Gimbel once or twice approached him with offers to run him for manager of the crew or the Junior Prom.
One day, about a month after his withdrawal, when, bundled up in his dressing-gown, he went shuffling into the basement for a cold tub, he had quite a shock, that brought home visually to him the realization of the price he had paid.
It had been the practise from long custom to inscribe on the walls tentative lists of the probable selections from the class for the three senior societies. On this particular list his name had stood at the head from the beginning, and the constant familiar sight of it had always brought him a warm, secure pleasure.
All at once, as he looked at it, he perceived a leaden blur where his name had stood, and the names of Bain and Hunter heading the list.
"I suppose they've got me down among the last now," he said, with a long breath. He searched the list, his name was not even on it. This popular estimation of what he himself believed had nevertheless power to wound him deeply.
"Well, it's so—I knew it," he said; but it was said in bitterness, with a newer and keener realization.
He began indeed to feel like an outsider, and, rebelling against the injustice of it all, to set his heart in bitterness. Hungerford and Bob Story, Dopey McNab often, tried to keep up with him, but, understanding their motives, he was proudly sensitive, and sought rather to avoid them.
Meanwhile the opposition to the sophomore societies reached the point of open revolt, and a mass meeting was held, which, as had been planned, caused a stir throughout the press of the country, and brought in from the alumni a storm of protest.