Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/122

 Neale's voice quavered with another sort of emotion … that was the doctrine! "Off with the fetters!" He pictured himself in a blue flannel shirt and flowing neckerchief, alone, or with some perfect comrade, knowing reality, sneering at railway trains and cities.

It was a gorgeous dream … but of course the first Tuesday in September found him back at a desk at Hadley with all the grinding and polishing wheels of that well-appointed educational mill at work on the corners of his individuality, bent on turning out the fifty young Seniors smooth and identical, the perfection of the Hadley type. And since this was the last year, the faculty speeded up the hunt and all the pack put their noses to the ground and ran their legs off in pursuit of mathematics and science. The pace was cruelly hot, and it was specially hard for Neale because he had yielded to the captain's entreaties and had come out for the football team. He made left tackle with little competition and through October and November practised almost without coaching (Hadley permitted athletics but was too busy to encourage anything so childish), and played and was beaten with painful regularity.

Neale found himself dropping far below the rating he had maintained in the lower classes. He began to pant and strain as he had the first year. It was a gruelling race; but temperamentally he liked races and his wind got better as the months went by. He cut out all superfluities—no dancing—no reading for amusement except on Sunday mornings, and then only short poems about Vagabondia and the Open Road. Work, work, work through every waking hour. By April he had risen to sixth in his class, and felt grimly sure of holding his stride to the end.

On the night of Easter Monday, Neale was bent over his desk with a green eye-shade, trying various combinations to solve a problem in analytical geometry, when his father knocked at the door, walked in and sat down on the bed. This was, so remarkable that Neale knew something was up. One of the things that Neale had always taken for granted in his