"I give my consent? This is monstrous, Josephine, monstrous. I did not wish to be a killjoy and a marplot, or I would have forbidden Fred to touch a foot-ball after he entered college. Had you, my dear, given me the least bit of support, I should have nipped the whole business in the bud. Yet now you seek to throw the blame on me."
The suggestion of the dire parental sternness of which I had evidently just missed being guilty caused her thoughts to fly off on an opposite tack. "The poor darling, his heart was so set on being chosen," she said. "I am sure, Fred, it would have been a terrible blow to him if he had not succeeded."
"I dare say that it was his chief motive in going to college," I interjected, a little indignantly.
"I really think it was," she murmured, with sweet maternal sympathy. "I shall live though in constant dread until it is over and done with."
"What is over and done with?"
"The Harvard-Yale foot-ball match. It's on account of that he's been so anxious to belong. And, Fred, he said to me the other day that if he was chosen, he hoped that we would go to Springfield to see the game. It is terrible to think that I might see him killed before my eyes, but he is set on our going."
"It is all a piece of infernal nonsense," I remarked, with majestic dignity; nevertheless, the idea did not strike me as a bad one. To tell the truth, I was beginning to be curious to see this game, which, according to the views of my eldest son, was the greatest game of the day, and to those of Horace Plympton a barbaric spectacle.
And now befell me a curious experience; at least it seemed to me such. I found that I, who, though considered an industrious and painstaking lawyer, have never awakened any especial interest in the community, had acquired lustre and importance by virtue of the circumstance that I had a son on the University foot-ball eleven. College graduates of various ages, who had hitherto classed me with the general run of their acquaintance, grew suddenly cordial and congratulatory in their manner, and I had the satisfaction of reading in the public prints an item to the effect that Frederick ——, the father of the well-known half-back of the Harvard University foot-ball eleven, had recently visited New York for a few days. Altogether I had become, for the first time in my existence, an object of consequence to my fellow-citizens, and almost to the world at large.
As for the hero himself, he bore his importance modestly and meekly, though he evidently considered that he had rescued the family name from obscurity and set it gloriously in the public eye by dint of his renown. He was in strict training, and fiercely conscientious as to what he ate and drank, and as to his hours of sleep. Little was heard in the house when he was at home but conjecture and estimate as to who was likely to win in the impending contest. Had I been properly attentive, I might have learned from his lips not merely the names and nicknames of the members of the respective teams and the positions on the field they were to fill, but their weights in fighting trim, their fine points both as foot-ball kickers and as men, and not improbably their love affairs. When now and then, as occasionally happened, I betrayed by an unfortunate question or by unappreciative silence my lack of familiarity with this or that celebrity, the look of wondering pity with which my boy, and indeed every member of the family, regarded me made me feel myself to be a veritable ignoramus. Josephine and her girls knew the whole business from beginning to end, and I must confess that I secretly drank in more than I pretended.
A fortnight before the match was to come off Sam Bangs, who, as some of you will remember, is a second cousin of mine and rather a pal of Josephine's, appeared at the house one evening and laid before me, in his engaging, plausible fashion, a project which he and his wife and my wife had cooked up between them. He and Josephine assured me, in the first place, that I wouldn't have the least bother in the matter, and that everything would be perfectly plain running for the reason that Sam was intimate with the manager of the railroad, and that little Fred had secured the requisite number of tickets for the game. Then he proceeded to inform me that they had conceived the idea of going to see the game at Springfield in a private special car; that the manager had promised to let him have one, and that it would be much more jolly to go with a few friends like that and have a luncheon comfortably served by a caterer than to be lumped in the common cars with Tom, Dick, and Harry, who were liable to be noisy students, or still more noisy prize-fighters, and starve; that there were several people crazy to go whom it would be very pleasant to have, notably Mrs. Guy Sloane and Mrs. Walter Warner (nee Polly Flinders), and that the expense would be comparatively trifling.