can’t learn to handle boys, how can I ever hope to handle men?—and
that’s what a lawyer has to do, I suppose.”

“Look here,” said Barclay. “You’re still young; if you’ve learned what’s
the matter with you—and you seem to have—you’ve learned more than most
fellows of your age. It’s less than a month that you’ve been here, and
you’ve never had any experience before in dealing with boys. Why should
you expect to know it all at once?”

“I suppose there’s something in that. But I feel that I haven’t it in me
ever to get on with them.”

“You’re doing better now than you did at first; they don’t look on you
entirely as a joke now, do they?”

“Perhaps not.—Oh,” Irving broke out, “I know what the trouble is—I want
to be liked—and I suppose I’m not the likeable kind.”

Barclay did not at once dispute this statement, and Irving was beginning
to feel hurt.

“The point is,” said Barclay at last, “that to be liked by boys you’ve
got to like them. If you hold off from them and distrust them and try to
wrap yourself up in a cloak of dignity or mystery, they won’t like you
because they won’t know you. If you show an interest in them and their
interests, you can be as stern with them as justice demands, and they
won’t lay it up against you. But if you don’t show an interest—why, you
can’t expect them to have an interest in you.”

They turned a bend in the road; the athletic field lay spread out before