"Here now, fellows, no grouping around here. We want to see a sport and
a gospel shark sitting arm in arm. Come on, Schley, your social
position's all right--there's only one crowd here to-night. No one here
is going to boost you into a senior society. Percolate, fellows,
percolate. We've scrapped like Sam Hill, now we're tired of it. No more
biting, scratching, or gouging. Don't forget this is a love feast, and
they're going to be lovelier. Now let's try over that song for the
Princeton game. Bob Story perpetrated it--pretty rotten, I think, but
let's hit it up all the same."
The rallies jumped into popularity. The class gasped, then laughed at
Stover's abrupt reference to the late unpleasantness, and with the laugh
all constraint went. The class found itself, as a regiment returns to
its pride again. It went to the games in a body, it healed its
differences, and packed the long room at the Tontine each Saturday
night, shouting out the chorus which Buck Waters, McNab, Stone, and the
talent led.
Many, undoubtedly, marvelling at the ease with which Stover had inspired
the gathering, admired him for what they believed was a clever bid for
society honors. But the truth was that he succeeded because he had no
underlying motive, because he had achieved in himself absolute
independence and fearlessness of any outer criticism, and his strength
with the crowd was just the consciousness of his own liberty.
By the fall of junior year, he was the undisputed leader of the class, a
force that had brought to it a community of interest and friendly
understanding. Unknown to him, his classmates began to regard him,
despite his old defiance, as one whom a senior society could not
overlook. Stover had no such feeling. He believed that the hatred in
what remained of the sophomore society organization was, and would
continue, unrelenting, and this conviction had determined him in a
course of action to which he was impelled by other reasons.
He went through the football season as he had gone through the previous
season, with a record for distinguished brilliancy, acclaimed by all as
the best end in years, the probable captain of the next year. He wanted
the position, as he had desired it on his first arrival at Yale, and yet
he surrendered it. Hunter had developed into a tackle and made the team.
In the class below were two men of the defunct sophomore societies.
Stover had vividly before him the record of Dana, his captain of
freshman year, and the memory of the ordeal after the game, when he had
stood up and acknowledged his lack of leadership.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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