Stover breathed hard and tried to bring his mind to the printed lesson. The Tennessee Shad, sighing audibly, continued his ablutions, dressed and sat down.
"Dink."
"What?"
"Why did you do it?"
Then Stover, flinging down his book with an access of rage, cried out:
"Why? Because you all, every damn one of you, expected me to lie!"
The next day Stover, who had firmly made up his mind to a sort of modified ostracism, was amazed to find that over night he had become a hero. By the next morning the passion and the bitterness of the struggle having died away, the house looked at the matter in a calmer mood and one by one came to him and gripped his hand with halting, blurted words of apology or explanation.
Utterly unprepared for this development, Stover all at once realized that he had won what neither courage nor wit had been able to bring him, the something he had always longed for without being quite able to name it—the respect of his fellows. He felt it in the looks that followed him as he went over to chapel, in the nodded recognition of Fifth Formers, who had never before noticed him, in The Roman himself, who flunked him without satire or aggravation. And not yet knowing himself, his impulses or the strange things that lay dormant beneath the surface of his everyday life, Stover was a little ashamed, as though he did not deserve it all.
That afternoon as Dink was donning his football togs, preparing for practice, a knock came at the door which opened on a very much embarrassed delegation from the Woodhull—the Coffee-colored Angel, Cheyenne Baxter and Tough McCarty.