Owen Johnson
Stover at Yale
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066234225
Table of Contents
ILLUSTRATIONS
| "Together they went choking through the crowd" | Frontispiece |
| FACING PAGE | |
| "'Hello,' said Rogers' quiet voice. 'Well, what do you want?'" | 20 |
| "'I come not to stultify myself in the fumes of liquor, but to do you good'" | 90 |
| "The period of duns set in, and the house became a place of mystery and signals" | 202 |
| "Oh, father and mother pay all the bills, and we have all the fun" | 230 |
| "'Life's real to those fellows; they're fighting for something'" | 254 |
| "Regan was his one friend" | 286 |
| "'Curse the man who invented fish-house punch'" | 292 |
STOVER AT YALE
STOVER AT YALE
CHAPTER I
Dink Stover, freshman, chose his seat in the afternoon express that would soon be rushing him to New Haven and his first glimpse of Yale University. He leisurely divested himself of his trim overcoat, folding it in exact creases and laying it gingerly across the back of his seat; stowed his traveling-bag; smoothed his hair with a masked movement of his gloved hand; pulled down a buckskin vest, opening the lower button; removed his gloves and folded them in his breast pocket, while with the same gesture a careful forefinger, unperceived, assured itself that his lilac silk necktie was in snug contact with the high collar whose points, painfully but in perfect style, attacked his chin. Then, settling, not flopping, down, he completed his preparations for the journey by raising the sharp crease of the trousers one inch over each knee—a legendary precaution which in youth is believed to prevent vulgar bagging. Each movement was executed without haste or embarrassment, but leisurely, with the deliberate savoir-faire of the complete man of the world he had become at the terrific age of eighteen.
In front of him spasmodic freshmen arrived, struggling from their overcoats in embarrassed plunges that threatened to leave them publicly in their shirt sleeves. That they imputed to him the superior dignity of an upper classman was pleasurably evident to Stover from their covert respectful glances. He himself felt conscious of a dividing-line. He, too, was a freshman, and yet not of them.
He had just ended three years at Lawrenceville, where from a ridiculous beginning he had fought his way to the captaincy of the football eleven and the vice-presidency of the school. He had been the big man in a big school, and the sovereign