“It’s going to be great!” opined Sumner, with his usual outburst of enthusiasm for what he approved. “Everything was pleasant and straight, and nobody tried to get the advantage of anybody else.” “I’m not so sure about that,” answered Joe Talbot, commonly called “Pete.” The origin of this nickname is involved in obscurity. Some boys derived it from a character in a play; some asserted that Joe’s family had given him the name in jest when he was a toddler. Steve Wilmot, the wag of the class, maintained that it was descriptive,—he was called Pete because he looked Pete,—and this explanation was on the whole popular, especially as Talbot stoutly protested against it. “Why not?” demanded Sumner. “I’ve no confidence in that Smith. He’s too oily and smug. He’s got some scheme he means to work.” “Shucks!” retorted Jack. “Your brother Bob has prejudiced you against him with his talk about that old football squabble. If I were a junior in college, like Bob, I’d try to forget about school rows.” “Those are the things you remember longest,” Pete answered wisely. “You can’t change the facts, can you? You can’t make a low trick any better by forgetting it. If it happened, it’s history, as much as Bunker Hill. It shows the kind of man Smith is.” “Was!” corrected Jack. “That was a long time ago, and he’s probably changed as much as we have since we came into the sixth together. Just think what little fools we were then, how we thought the verb _amo_ was too hard to learn, and cried when Mr. Lawton lectured us, and Mussy used to send us out of French every day for whispering in class.” “We weren’t anything but kids then. Neither of us was over twelve.” Talbot spoke as if seventeen, which was their present age, represented the climax of maturity. “I was just trying to make you see that people change. Smith has changed too.” “Perhaps he has,” growled Talbot, “but I don’t believe it’s for the better. He’s got us into the league just because he thinks Newbury can beat us. You don’t suppose he’s doing it out of love for us, do you?” “No doubt he thinks we are a good crowd for his school to tie up with,” answered Sumner, with ready complacency. “I really believe those fellows would rather beat us than any other school, but that’s because they are jealous of us. We are only a private school, more than half of us little kids in knickerbockers, but we have the inside track in Harvard, and we’re on the top socially. They don’t like that.” “It’s the little kids and getting into college so early that spoils our athletics,” remarked Talbot. “Newbury is a public endowed school with lots of big fellows who don’t go to college, and Trowbridge is a boarding-school in the country where the fellows have nothing to do but play games all day. We aren’t anything but a school building in town and a playground in Brookline.” “And Adams’s,” put in Sumner.