In front of him spasmodic freshmen arrived, struggling from their overcoats in embarrassed plunges that threatened to leave them publicly in their shirt sleeves. That they imputed to him the superior dignity of an upper classman was pleasurably evident to Stover from their covert respectful glances. He himself felt conscious of a dividing-line. He, too, was a freshman, and yet not of them. He had just ended three years at Lawrenceville, where from a ridiculous beginning he had fought his way to the captaincy of the football eleven and the vice-presidency of the school. He had been the big man in a big school, and the sovereign responsibilities of that anointed position had been, of course, such that he no longer felt himself a free agent. He had been of the chosen, and not all at once could he divest himself of the idea that his slightest action had a certain public importance. His walk had been studiously imitated by twenty shuffling striplings. His hair, parted on the side, had caused a revolution among the brushes and stirred up innumerable indignant cowlicks. His tricks of speech, his favorite exclamations, had become at once lip-currency. At that time golf and golf-trousers were things of unthinkable daring. He had given his approval, appeared in the baggy breeches, and at once the ban on bloomers had been lifted and the Circle had swarmed with the grotesqueries of variegated legs for the first time boldly revealed. He had stood between the school and its tyrants. He had arrayed himself in circumstantial attire--boiled shirt, high collar, and carefully dusted derby--and appeared before the faculty with solemn, responsible face no less than three separate times, to voice the protest of four hundred future American citizens: first, at the insidious and alarming repetition of an abhorrent article of winter food known as scrag-birds and sinkers; second, to urge the overwhelming necessity of a second sleighing holiday; and, third and most important, firmly to assure the powers that be that the school viewed with indignation and would resist to despair the sudden increase of the already staggering burden of the curriculum. The middle-aged faculty had listened gravely to the grave expounder of such grave demands, had promised reform and regulation in the matter of the sinkers, granted the holiday, and insufficiently modified the brutal attempt at injecting into the uneager youthful mind a little more of the inconsequential customs of the Greeks and Romans.