"I'm afraid I don't understand you, Harry." There was such a complete absence of anger in the other's tone that Harry felt a momentary outburst of sympathy for this honest, good-tempered creature.
"I'm sorry, Judy," he said. "The fact is, you take track deadly seriously, and I don't. That's all there is to it. So we're bound to disagree."
So Harry went to the North Carolina mountains and shot quail and rode horseback and played bridge and carried on generally with James and Beatrice and Trotty and eight or ten others of his age. When he returned to New Haven he went out to the track field and jumped and ran about as before, but nobody paid any attention to him. Nor was he asked to rejoin the training table.
"It'll do him good to let his heels cool for a while," observed Dimmock to Macgrath.
"That's all very well, but you'd better not let them cool too long, if you want to get a place in the hurdles with Harvard," granted the coach.
"I was afraid all along we'd have to take him on again," said the other. "He gets better and better on the track all the time, and queerer and queerer every other way. I don't trust him."
"He's a second Popham," said Macgrath.
About a week before the Harvard meet Dimmock approached the second Popham and with very commendable absence of anything like false pride asked him if he would please put himself under Macgrath's orders for the next few days and run in the meet. Harry graciously consented. He hurdled abominably badly for a week, showing neither form nor speed; then he hurdled against Harvard and beat their best men by a safe margin. He won a first place, and his Y.
But that did not make him any more popular in the track world.
Later in the spring Beatrice came on for a visit, anxious to see the university that Harry had preferred to Oxford. She and Lady Fletcher stayed with Aunt Selina; presently Aunt Miriam went on and left Beatrice alone there. She and Aunt Selina struck up one of those unaccountable intimacies that occasionally arise between people of widely different ages.