CHAPTER IV WEIGHED AND MEASURED 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.