from such a source.

That portion of his crowded schedule George grew eventually to like. It
brought him either unrestrained scolding or else a tempered praise; and
he enjoyed his cross-country runs. Sylvia's bulldog usually accompanied
him, unleashed, for he could control the animal. With surprised eyes he
saw estates as extravagant as Oakmont, and frequently in better taste.
Little by little he picked up the names of the families that owned them.
He told himself that some day he would enter those places as a guest,
bowed to by such servants as he had been. It was possible, he promised
himself bravely, if only he could win a Yale or a Harvard game.

He enjoyed, too, the hours he spent at the field. He could measure his
progress there as well as in Bailly's study. Green was slow with either
praise or blame, but sometimes Rogers and his clan would come down, and,
sitting in the otherwise empty stands, would audibly marvel at the
graceful trajectory of his punts. He soiled himself daily at the
tackling dummy. He sprawled after an elusive ball, falling on it or
picking it up on the run. Meantime, he had absorbed the elements of the
rules. He found them rather more complicated than the classics.

The head coach came from the city one day. Like Green, he said nothing
in praise or blame, merely criticising pleasantly; but George felt that
he was impressed. The great man even tossed the ball about with him for
a while, teaching him to throw at a definite mark. After that Rogers and
his cronies wanted to be more in evidence than ever, but George had no
time for them, or for anything outside his work.

His will to survive the crushing grind never really faltered, but he
resented its necessity, sometimes wistfully, sometimes with turbulence.
He despised himself for regretting certain pleasanter phases of his
serfdom at Oakmont. The hot, stuffy room on the top floor of the frame
house; the difficult books; the papers streaked with intricate and
reluctant figures, contrived frequently to swing his mind to pastoral
corners of the Planter estate. He might have held title to them, they
had been so much his own. He had used them during his free time for the
reading of novels, and latterly, he remembered, for formless dreams of
Sylvia's beauty. At least his mind had not been put to the torture
there. He had had time to listen to a bird's song, to ingratiate himself
with a venturesome squirrel, to run his hands through the long grass,