From this time on Wolcott began to feel himself a part of the Seaton life. Through the Mandolin Club he added several very agreeable fellows to his list of acquaintances, while his vanity was flattered by the thought that he was no longer the last of four hundred, but one of a selected few. As an immediate result he was thrown much more with Marchmont, with whom he undertook to practise regularly, and soon became intimate.

There was much in the character of Marchmont to impress the new boy. His attitude was always that of a person superior to those about him. He seemed to look up to no one,—instructor, scholar, senior, or athlete. The faculty he regarded as good enough in their way, but narrow-minded. Laughlin he either derided as a country boor, or contemptuously praised as a Roman noble might have praised a successful gladiator. Tompkins was a cowboy, Poole a prig, Planter a very decent sort of a fellow. Lindsay he seemed to count as one of his own class—a distinction of which Wolcott was made to feel the whole complimentary force.

In his general point of view Marchmont differed wholly from the average Seatonian. He had no particular ambition, unless to get through school without being expelled, or to slip safely into college. He cared little about lessons, but much about the condition and the perfection of his attire. He had no interest in athletics except as a passing show; his notion of proper exercise was horseback riding and fencing. He could talk, when necessary, on almost any subject, but his favorite topics were automobiles, horse-races, and the theatre. While the democratic spirit of the school did not please him and he found few fellows wholly to his liking among his classmates, his chief grievances seemed to be the food served at his boarding-house, and the necessity of getting up for eight o’clock chapel. The first he tried to remedy by little messes prepared in his room on a chafing dish; the second, being irremediable, he had to endure. He was not popular, for his manners were too supercilious to please the average boy, who is instinctively democratic and always admires the fellow who can do something rather than the fellow who claims to be something; but in a certain small coterie he ranked as king.

Lindsay’s introduction to work in the gymnasium was a novel experience. Here he was stripped, weighed, measured in height, girth of limbs and chest; tested in strength of back and arms and legs. Later he was given a chart with his measurements and strength plotted in lines upon it, so as to show his relative condition compared with the average for his age; and a card with directions as to the particular exercise which he needed to develop his weaker parts. All this the boy took, as he took much that was new to him in the school, with curiosity and temporary interest.

There was one circumstance, however, in connection with the examination, that made a deeper impression. When the measurements and the testing were over, Mr. Doane asked, “Did you ever play football?”

A week before entering school Wolcott would have answered immediately “yes.” But he had heard so much, in the few days that he had spent at Seaton, of the hard games played, of the great contests with Hillbury about which the athletic life of the school centred, of the high standard of the school teams, and what “playing football” really meant to the Seatonian, that he had almost said “no.”

“A very little,” he replied.

“I think you have football in you,” went on the director. “By that I mean that you have fine, solid organs, and muscles developing well; while from the little I have seen of you, I should judge that you might be quick. A heavy man who is quick is a prize to a football team. Should you like to play?”

Wolcott’s eyes brightened. “Of course I should!”

“Then try to build yourself up as your card directs. You must strengthen those abdominal muscles, and harden up your legs and arms. I suppose you have heard of Nowell, who fitted here?”

“The old Harvard tackle?” asked Wolcott, eagerly.

The director nodded. “He was a fine type of the hard trainer. Whenever I think of Nowell the picture in my mind is of a solid, brawny, determined boy standing in the corner of the gymnasium where the heavy dumb-bells lie, and swinging his pair of three-pounders the appointed number of times. He did that in addition to his class exercise without shirking, day in and day out, for months—stuck to it while the other fellows were amusing themselves, till he got to be a regular gymnasium joke. Many a time I’ve seen some rascal standing in front of him mimicking his motions, and laughing at him. It was his turn to laugh when he made the Harvard Varsity the second week he was on the field.”

“There aren’t many fellows with Nowell’s ability,” said Lindsay.

“There are not many with his determination,” corrected the instructor, with a smile.

The next day Laughlin stopped Lindsay outside the academy. “I’ve been talking with Mr. Doane about you,” said the captain. “He thinks you are good material for football. I want you to take hold with us and try hard to get yourself in shape to do well in the fall.”

“I don’t believe I could do much,” Wolcott replied doubtfully. In reality he felt flattered and eager; yet the dictatorial abruptness of the speech disconcerted him, and Marchmont’s criticisms of the plebeian captain had left their impression on his mind.

“It is a question of trying, not of doing,” said Laughlin, seriously. “You can’t tell what you may turn out to be, if you try. It’s a great thing to win a Hillbury game; it’s fine just to play in one, but to win,—win fairly and squarely, because your team’s better and plays better,—why, it’s like winning a great battle.”

“But you didn’t win last fall.”

Laughlin’s heavy jaws came together. “No, we lost, and deserved to lose. But it mustn’t happen twice. It won’t, if we take hold of it right and get every man out ready to do his best and help the school on, whether he makes the team or not. If you don’t make the first, you can play on the second and learn football all the time and help a lot. A good second goes far toward making a good first. Take hold with us and try, try as Nowell did, and Melvin did, and big Curtis and all those fellows who used to be here. It doesn’t so much matter whether you make the team or not; if you don’t make it, a better man than you will, and the better you are the better he’ll have to be to beat you out.”

Lindsay’s was one of those temperaments which kindle slowly from within; the internal fire must burn fiercely before the blaze appears. The captain’s words appealed to him and stirred him; and yet as his eye rested on the gray flannel shirt, neat and fresh though it looked with the harmonious black tie, and eminently appropriate as it really was to the work that Laughlin was on his way to do, Marchmont’s sneers at the “coal-heaver captain,” and sweeping condemnation of all attempts to tie up socially “such fellows and fellows of our class,” came instantly to his mind. Theoretically he had not accepted Marchmont’s sentiments; practically they were already affecting the atmosphere of his ideas. The thought of the cynic’s scornful laugh smothered his enthusiasm like a wet blanket.

“I’ll think it over,” he said indifferently. “There really won’t be much of anything to do until next fall.”

“There’s where you’re wrong,” replied Laughlin, earnestly. “What you can do next fall depends on what you do now. Ask Doane, if you don’t believe me. Every time you do your gymnasium work you want to think: this work is for the eleven and the school. And when you’re tempted to do things outside that you’d better not do, you want to think: this is the place where the ‘no’ counts three times, for myself and the eleven and the school. That’s the way Melvin did when he learned to kick, and he made the Harvard Varsity in his freshman year just on his punting. That’s the way we’ve got to do here. Football players don’t grow wild like huckleberries in a pasture. They’re made, and made with hard work.”

“I’ll do what I can,” said Wolcott, carried away by the other’s earnestness.

“Good! That’s the talk. Now I must be getting a move on, for I have two furnaces to clean out this morning. We’ll talk about it some more in a day or two.”

Later in the day Wolcott had a practice hour with Marchmont.

“I see you’re getting thick with Laughlin,” observed Marchmont, as he adjusted the strings of his mandolin. “Going in for football?”

“He wants me to try,” answered Lindsay, non-committal.

“I hope you may like it,” returned Marchmont. “The idea of lying in the mud with two or three foul, sweaty porkers clutching me by the neck doesn’t appeal to me. There’s one good thing about athletics for such fellows.”

“What’s that?”

“They get a bath a good deal more often than they otherwise would. Shall we try something new to-day?”