It had always seemed a little strange to any one who knew Gene that he had been one of the members of that crew of worthless cigarette-smokers. For Skelding was a fighter, and he was the only genuine fighter in the collection. The others were cowards of the most abject sort.
Skelding had a way of closing his mouth firmly, and keeping it closed, which was a most difficult thing for any other member of the set to do.
Indeed, Tilton Hull found it possible to keep his mouth closed only when it was held thus by his collar propping his lower jaw up. Take away his collar, and his jaw drooped at once.
Lew Veazie always carried his mouth open, breathing through it from habit. It would have caused him great discomfort, not to say agony, had he been compelled to close his mouth and keep it thus for three minutes without a break.
Of course, Ollie Lord imitated Veazie in everything, and he fancied that the insipid, brainless expression of a cigarette-smoker with open mouth in repose was proper.
Julian Ives breathed through his mouth from habit, but Chickering had a way of pressing his lips together, turning up his eyes, clasping his pale hands, and looking like a saint. This was the expression he wore as Skelding retired from the room, and he hoped it would be so impressed on Gene’s mind that the “rude fellow” would come to believe in time that he had done Rupert a great wrong. Skelding afterward spoke of that look as reminding him of a dying calf.
Gene descended the stairs, stepped on the steps, and drew several deep breaths, as if he would clear his lungs of the atmosphere that had defiled them while he was in that room. He was satisfied with himself and what he had done.
For some time he had been growing more and more disgusted with the Chickering crowd. Of late he had appeared in public with them as seldom as possible. Skelding was not a fool, and he saw at last that his folly in taking up with such fellows had given him his standing at Yale, and that standing was not pleasant to contemplate.
At last he had been taught the old, old lesson that a man is judged by the company he keeps. Most boys are told this early in life, but somehow it seems to have little impression on them until their eyes are opened by experience. Shun bad company; better have no friends than to be friendly with the wrong sort of fellows.