To his astonishment, Vickery snapped back, “I’m sorry to hear it.”
Winfield, seeing that he was in earnest, fumbled for words: “What the—Why the—Well, say!”
The slight and spindling youth confronted the bureau-chested giant and shook his finger in his face: “If you weren’t so much bigger than I am I’d give you worse than that actor gave you. To think that a great big hulk like you should try to attack a little girl like that! Don’t you ever dare speak to me or my sister again.”
Winfield gave an excellent imitation of incipient apoplexy. He seized Vickery by the lapels to demand: “Good Lord, ’Gene, you don’t think I—Say, what do you think I am, anyway? Why—Well, can you beat it? I ask you? Ah, you can all go plumb to—Ah, what’s the good!”
Winfield never was an explainer. He lacked language; he lacked the ambition to be understood. It made him an excellent sportsman. When he lost he wasted no time in explaining why he had not won. To him the martyrdom of being misunderstood was less bitter than the martyrdom of justifying himself. He was so dazed now by the outcome of his knight-errantry that he resolved to leave the college to its own verdict of him. Eugene Vickery’s ruling passion, however, was a frenzy to understand and to be understood. He caught the meaning in Winfield’s incoherence and seized him by the lapel:
“You mean that you didn’t go out on the stage to scare the girl, but to—Well, that’s more like you! I’m a lunkhead not to have known it from the first. Why, a copper collared me, too, and accused me of being one of the Freshmen! I talked him out of it and proved I was a post-graduate, or I’d have spent the night in a dungeon, too. Well, well! and to think I got you so wrong! You write a statement to the papers right away.”
“Ah, what’s the good?”
“Then I will.”
“Just as much obliged, but no, you won’t.”
“You ought to square yourself with the people who—”