Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/238

 his store of oaths and smutty stories … the chapter thought well of him and he thought even better of himself.

By the time spring came Neale felt happily sure that he was seeing life without making a fool of himself, which was, according to his latest philosophy (borrowed from Horace) the right thing to do. He would be nineteen in a few months now, time to attain a calm, mature, unsurprised acceptance of the world. No half-baked enthusiasms about anything. Except football, of course. That was far above all philosophies of life. In the spring of his Sophomore year Neale was consuming pipefuls of tobacco and meditating on what he called his "past life," censuring or approving his actions by the newly acquired yard-stick of the "golden mean." What a youthful idiot he had been about Don Roberts! That was so long ago that he could smile cynically at both his enthusiasm and his disillusion, each equally far from balance. Balance. Poise. That was the right dope for a man of the world.

And yet, spring was in the air, and it was hard, even for the ripe maturity of nineteen to be perfectly balanced. Neale had no girl at hand, and was betrayed into working off the excitement of spring days by writing an English theme on the tulips in Union Square. So much early May, both of style and personality seeped into this, that the jaded, discouraged young professor of English felt his heart leap up with incredulous hope and pleasure. To encourage the writer he read parts of it aloud to the class, while Neale's very soul scorched with shame. One of his non-athletic classmates, a brilliant, precocious, foreign-born fellow, with literary aspirations, came up to him afterwards and congratulated him enviously on his success. It was a terrible experience all around. Neale vowed furiously to himself that never again would he let any real feeling slip into a college theme.