at quarter-back, exhorting in wild despair, making impossible tackles,
calling signals in a voice that had diminished to a hoarse, furious
whisper, yet found time to revel in the blood-stained bandage around his
head, and the straining, glorious heroism of plunging, crashing bodies
and aching limbs. For those minutes courage flowed like wine out of the
November dusk, and he was the eternal hero, one with the sea-rover on the
prow of a Norse galley, one with Roland and Horatius, Sir Nigel and Ted
Coy, scraped and stripped into trim and then flung by his own will into
the breach, beating back the tide, hearing from afar the thunder of
cheers . . . finally bruised and weary, but still elusive, circling an
end, twisting, changing pace, straight-arming . . . falling behind the
Groton goal with two men on his legs, in the only touchdown of the game.

* * * *

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SLICKER

From the scoffing superiority of sixth-form year and success Amory looked
back with cynical wonder on his status of the year before. He was
changed as completely as Amory Blaine could ever be changed. Amory plus
Beatrice plus two years in Minneapolis--these had been his ingredients
when he entered St. Regis'. But the Minneapolis years were not a thick
enough overlay to conceal the "Amory plus Beatrice" from the ferreting
eyes of a boarding-school, so St. Regis' had very painfully drilled
Beatrice out of him, and begun to lay down new and more conventional
planking on the fundamental Amory. But both St. Regis' and Amory were
unconscious of the fact that this fundamental Amory had not in himself
changed. Those qualities for which he had suffered, his moodiness,
his tendency to pose, his laziness, and his love of playing the fool,
were now taken as a matter of course, recognized eccentricities in a star