"Oh, fairly rotten. They all seem to be eight-thirties. Here, you can see," producing a paper.
"That's not so bad," pronounced James, approvingly. "Nothing on Wednesday or Saturday afternoons, so that you can get to ball games and things, and nothing any afternoon till five, so that you'll have plenty of time for track work."
"Oh, yes, track work; I'd forgotten that."
"Well, you don't want to forget it; you want to go right out and hire a locker and get to work, to-morrow, if possible. If track's the best thing for you to go out for, that is, and I guess it is, all right. You're too light for football, and you don't know anything about baseball, and you haven't got a crew build."
"What is a crew build?" asked Harry.
"Well, if you put it that way, I don't know that I can tell you. It's a mysterious thing; I've been trying to find out myself for several years. I don't see why I haven't got a fairly good crew build myself, but they always tell me I haven't, when I suggest going out for it. However, you haven't got one, that's easy. So you'll just have to stick to track."
"Yes," said Harry soberly, "I suppose I shall."
Harry was what is commonly known as a good mixer, and made acquaintances among his classmates rapidly enough to suit even the nice taste of James. In general, however, they remained acquaintances and never became friends. It was not that they were not nice, most of them; "ripping fellows, all of them," Harry described them to his brother. They were, in fact, too nice; those who lived near him were all of the best preparatory school type, the kind that invariably leads the class during freshman year. Harry found them conventional, quite as much so as the English type, though in a different way. Intercourse with them failed to give him stimulus; he found himself always more or less talking down to them, and intellectual stimulus was what Harry needed above all things among his friends.
There were exceptions, however. The most brilliant was that of Jack Trotwood, probably the last man with whom Harry might have been expected to strike up a friendship. Harry first saw him in a Latin class, one of the first of the term. Trotwood sat in the same row as Harry, two or three seats away from him—the acquaintance was not even of the type that alphabetical propinquity is responsible for. On the day in question he dropped a fountain pen, and spent some moments in burrowing ineffectually under seats in search of it. The fugitive chattel at length turned up directly under Harry's chair, and as he leaned over to restore it to its owner he noticed something about his face that appealed to him at once. He never could tell what it was; the flush that bending over had brought to it, the embarrassment, the dismay at having made a fuss in public, the smile, containing just the right mixture of cordiality and formality, yet undeniably sweet withal, with which he thanked him; perhaps it was any or all of these things. At any rate after class, on his way back toward York Street, Harry found himself hurrying to catch up with Trotwood, who was walking a few paces ahead of him. Trotwood turned as he came up, and smiled again.
"That was sort of a stinking lesson, wasn't it?" he asked.