Hardie’s pique was enhanced by the apparently different reception accorded to another new Adamsite, Archibald Dunn. As a matter of fact, the principle followed by the boys in the treatment of the two cases was identical: each was accepted at the outset at his face value. While Hardie made no claim to ability, importance, or friends among the great, Dunn’s method was to assume everything, to throw himself frankly on the credulity and friendliness of his new companions. Of course he played football; he had been end on the Westport High School at the beginning of last season, but a shoulder bruise got in the practice had thrown him out of the regular games. He liked baseball better; he and a friend of his, who made the Yale Freshmen, used to be the battery of a corking little nine they got up at their summer place. His favorite sport was automobiling; in his first half-hour in Tracy’s room he told five astonishing stories of marvellous escapes from death or the police. He sailed, too,—used to take charge of his uncle’s forty-footer in cruises. Dunn’s manners were undeniably easy. In twenty-four hours he knew all the small boys at Adams’s by their nicknames, and treated the older ones as if they were intimates of years’ standing. The Tracys, Ben and Louis, might smile a little incredulously at the broadest of Dunn’s claims, but he amused them, and, provisionally at least, they accepted him. “He’s good sport, anyway,” said Ben, on the second day of school, while describing the Adams household to Sumner. “He can talk more than any person I ever saw, and he likes himself to beat the band, but he seems to be a good fellow to have round.” “What about Hardie?” “Oh, he’s a zero, a good little boy that never speaks unless he’s spoken to. He sat up in his room all last evening, grinding at algebra and Latin. Just think of being so fierce about the first day’s lessons!” “All the new ones do that,” opined Sumner; “they’re scared.” “Dunn didn’t. He loafed round Louis’s room, telling stories, the first two hours, and spent the rest of the evening looking for a trot to Xenophon. He says it’s a waste of time trying to get along without one.” “Flunked to-day, didn’t he?” “Don’t know. He’s not in any of my classes.” By favor of chance, Dunn did not flunk. He was called up in Latin on grammar questions which he happened to know. Hardie did not escape so easily. His lot fell upon a difficult passage which in his preparation he had not fully understood. Confused by the new surroundings and agitated by a nervous eagerness to do well, he floundered along like a pig in the mud, getting nowhere and accomplishing nothing but the amusement of a cruelly grinning class.