Page:Stanwood Pier--Crashaw brothers.djvu/89



T was well enough to have the knowledge that the fellows for whom one most cared  did not despise one for one’s weakness; but  for a long time soreness lingered in Edward’s  heart. He felt that he had been treated more generously than he deserved.

“I was nothing but a quitter,” he thought to himself moodily, time and again. He would stop to hold debates with himself about it while  he was dressing, while he was taking a bath;  the sight of his own muscles seemed particularly  to exasperate him. “You played out, you big beef!” Thus at such moments he would  address himself. “You lay down; that’s all there was to it.”

Jackson became a mere ordinary boy in retrospect, no such giant of strength and endurance after all. And when Edward’s indulgent side pleaded the memory of his sleepless night