board talks; there after the Pennsylvania's guards-back had battered through for thirty points, he heard the coach, white and shaking with emotion, pour out his biting post-mortem. "You, Jackson," shaking his fore-finger at the left-guard, "did you shoot your body in low and spill them in their own territory? No, you Stood Up!"
Neale's flesh crept, he was almost glad that he had escaped the fearful responsibility of being on the Varsity. It was terrible, such a weight on your shoulders. He shrank from it, and with all his being, aspired to it.
He made no impression on the football world, but his own interior world was transformed. He was no longer an isolated, formless Freshman, dumped down into the midst of the most callously laissez-faire of Universities, he was no more a forgotten molecule with no share in, or responsibility for the ultimate reaction. He had a shelter for his personality against the vast, daunting indifference of the universe. He was on the football squad.
He had feared he might have some trouble in explaining his absence from the supper-table at home, but that proved unexpectedly easy. The second evening after he began to play on the scrub, he found Father in the library at home, reading the sporting sheet of the Evening Telegram.
"Any other Crittendens in college, Neale?" he asked.
"Not that I know about."
"That's you on the foot-ball team, then?"
"Only on the scrub, yes, I'm trying. We have dinner together after practice. You don't mind, do you?"
"Me? Of course not," said Father.
Mother heard all this, apparently had known it before, and did not ask him to take care of himself and not get hurt. Neale looked over at her gratefully. Mother was all right.
The foot-ball season slid along, the Varsity improving every week. Neale glowed with caste-loyalty as Saturday after Saturday he watched the prowess of his big brothers. Every day he felt himself stretching up, broadening out, nearer to their stature, though nobody else gave him a thought. Life was full of big and generous and absorbing matter.
