ordingly, Scott had been sent to school throughout
the termtimes, sent well or ill, in good days and in bad. He had been
goaded into an ambition which held him at the top of his small classes
in the village school. When the top of the top class was reached, and
college was still inaccessible, Mrs. Brenton had stiffened her sinews
for yet greater toil and scrimping, and had sent her son up to Andover
where the Wheeler name was a tradition, where the knowledge of Scott's
ancestry would help him to find the employment that he needed. Scott's
education was to be by no means easy of achievement. To gain his school
diploma and his later degrees at college, he too must work, not alone
at books, but, in his off-hours, at any task that offered.

And Scott did work, too. Around him, other boys were going in for
football, making records on the track team, getting occasional leaves
to run in to Boston for an odd half-holiday. Then they came back,
hilarious and triumphant, to discuss their experience at mealtimes,
boasting, chaffing, wrangling merrily in the intimacy known to boyhood,
the world over. They never thought to pay any especial attention to the
other boy who brought them things to eat, a boy with luminous gray eyes
and clothes which were in sore need of pressing. He was just "that
waiter chap" and not a human being like themselves. They talked about
their secret plans before him, with no more thought of his personality
than as if he had been a concrete post. And, after listening to their
chatter throughout a protracted mealtime, after seeing, as he could not
fail to do, how he counted to them for absolutely nothing at all, Scott
Brenton had his hours when he too doubted the fact of his own humanity.
An active brain and an almost automatic body trained to supple service:
these by themselves, he realized, do not go far towards making a human
thing of life. Contacts are necessary for that, not total isolation;
and contact was the one thing denied him. Now and then he had his hours
of wishing that those other boys, boys whose talk was full of reference
to unfamiliar ways of life: of wishing that they would treat him a
little bit unkindly. Anything would be better than this absolute
ignoring of his individuality.

In his intervals of waiting on the table, he washed up the dishes. His
meals he took, standing by the sink, a plate on the shelf before him,
while he washed and chewed simultaneously. There were other tasks
besides,