Had the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric from across the Charles been present in the Westcott schoolroom that morning, he would have listened patronizingly and given the speaker a passing grade in consideration of his earnestness and good intentions. Had the professor spoken in Deering’s place, the boys would have closed their ears to his careful sentences and mentally marked him F—flat failure. They voted Deering A, and after their reserved fashion, assented to his maxims and treasured up his words. Even Dunn had visions of a time coming—in the dim future, of course—when he should throw off his indolence and self-indulgence, be a “good boy” and a grind, work like a Trojan in school and out, and win back the ground that he had lost. When it came to baseball, he could show them a few things!
As for Roger Hardie, Deering’s exhortation, and even more Deering’s personality, was as a match applied to tinder. His zeal took fire immediately. If the rowing men were like Deering, if rowing made such men, rowing was the thing for him! If honest, serious work profited at all in this untried sport in which experience was held to be so important, Roger would give that work ungrudgingly as long as his presence was tolerated on the squad. This resolve sent him to the gymnasium to exercise every day during the Christmas recess, when, save for himself and Mike and two smaller urchins, Adams’s was bereft of boys. It forced him to look upon himself as, in a fashion, consecrated to a special ambition, none the less wholesome and potent because cherished in secret. It made it easier for him to keep faith with his parents and his own conscience in the presence of the insidious temptations to which he, in common with all boys of his age, was subjected.
The tide of boys flooded back to school on the second of January, noisy with reminiscences of good times enjoyed. Talbot came from a camp on the shore of Cape Cod, where he had been shooting with Trask; Ben Tracy from Montreal. Dunn had spent his freedom in New York, where he had “been to something every night and had the highest old kind of a time.” The anecdotes of his experiences furnished him amusement for a week; his listeners tired of them in a much shorter time. Aside from these anecdotes, Dunn brought back little that was new from his vacation, certainly nothing so beneficial to himself or the school as an earnest purpose. He continued to slide downhill with careless content, finding specious excuses to present to teachers for classroom failures, and flattering himself that he was playing a grand rôle in the eyes of his mates as a jaunty, devil-may-care loafer.