Page:Lynch Williams--The girl and the game.djvu/310

 His mother—she used to warn him every week against letting any but "the nicest fellows" cultivate his acquaintance—began to feel sorry, not for her Willie, of course, but grieved for the deplorable ignorance of his classmates who did not seem to know a Dashwood when they saw one. What was the college coming to! She was interested in the college; the Dashwoods had always honored it with their patronage.

But note what happened. This shows that not all the sturdy stuff in the Dashwood blood had been spilt in the historic struggle to prove that all men were born free and equal. Instead of throwing a bluff at liking his loneliness, and doing the proudly exclusive act, after the manner of some of his kind, it occurred to him that possibly the fault lay in himself instead of in his classmates.

"To be sure—why should they like me?" he said. And then "a great light broke in upon him," as the lady novelists say, and he saw himself and other boys as they really were and not as they seemed to be. Then he