Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/466

 else he could give her. It was part of the reeling, glamorous intoxication into which she cast him, to hear himself going on like a stump-speaker. And she was adroit at hitting on subjects that made him talk. One day as they were amusing each other by describing their school-life, his as different from hers as if they had been brought up on different planets, football was mentioned. In no time she had him helplessly loquacious, explaining football to her. Think of having to explain football to anybody! He explained how you played it, and some of the rules, and how terribly you cared about it. And suddenly found that he had explained it to himself, that he really understood it for the first time.

"It's a kind of education that America has worked out for herself unconsciously, I believe, the American college idea of sports. No American undergraduate dreams of playing to amuse himself. He'd scorn to. He plays to win. That's the American idea. And it's a splendid one. To give every ounce in you to do what you set out to do—no lackadaisical dilettantism—your whole heart in it—and go to it! That's the way for men to live."

He was aware that Marise looked at him surprised by his fire. He was surprised by it, himself. He guessed perhaps he was ready to go back to work; perhaps he'd had enough of sauntering around. "That's what you learn in college athletics—how to give yourself to some aim and not to keep anything back for yourself. That's great, you know," he told her imperatively. "It is! It takes the personal littleness out of a boy to give his all to reach a goal. It makes a man out of a boy. But, oh, Lord!" he burst out with a great swing of his arm, "When that has made you a man, why don't they let you know that you have more goals to choose from than just different ways of making your living, most of them just buying and selling different sorts of things? You're trained in athletics to put your very heart and all of it, into what you do. That's fine! But why don't they train you just as hard to put your whole intelligence into being sure that what you're putting your heart into is worth doing, and is what you're meant to do? They don't train you for that, they won't even let you have a quiet