The Honorable Peter Stirling | Page 5

to see how he was getting
on. Oh, you fellows would have died to see it! There he sat, looking
straight out into vacancy, so plainly laboring for something to say that I
nearly exploded. Twice he opened his lips to speak, and each time
closed them again. The girl of course looked surprised, but she caught
my eye, and entered into the joke, and we both waited for
developments. Then she suddenly said to him, 'Now let's talk about
something else.' It was too much for me. I nearly choked. I don't know
what followed. Miss Jevons turned and asked me something. But when
I looked again, I could see the perspiration standing on Peter's forehead,
while the conversation went by jerks and starts as if it was riding over a
ploughed field. Miss Callender, whom he took in, told me afterwards
that she had never had a harder evening's work in her life. Nothing but
'yeses' and 'noes' to be got from him. She wouldn't believe what I said
of the old fellow."

Three or four such experiences ended Peter's dining out. He was
recognized as unavailable material. He received an occasional card to a
reception or a dance, for anything in trousers passes muster for such
functions. He always went when invited, and was most dutiful in the
counter-calls. In fact, society was to him a duty which he discharged
with the same plodding determination with which he did his day's
studies. He never dreamed of taking his social moments frivolously. He
did not recognize that society is very much like a bee colony--stinging
those who approached it shyly and quietly, but to be mastered by a bold
beating of tin pans. He neither danced nor talked, and so he was
shunted by the really pleasant girls and clever women, and passed his
time with wall-flowers and unbearables, who, in their normal sourness,
regarded and, perhaps, unconsciously made him feel, hardly to his
encouragement, that his companionship was a sort of penance. If he had
been asked, at the end of his senior year, what he thought of young
women and society, he would probably have stigmatized them, as he
himself had been formerly: "not nice." All of which, again to apply Mr.
Pierce's theory, merely meant that the phases which his own
characteristics had shown him, had re-acted on his own mind, and had
led him to conclude that girls and society were equally unendurable.
The condition was a dangerous one, and if psychology had its doctors
they would have predicted a serious heart illness in store for him. How
serious, would depend largely on whether the fever ran its natural
course, or whether it was driven inwards by disappointment. If these
doctors had ceased studying his mental condition and glanced at his
physical appearance, they would have had double cause to shake their
heads doubtingly.
Peter was not good-looking. He was not even, in a sense, attractive. In
spite of his taking work so hardly and life so seriously, he was entirely
too stout. This gave a heaviness to his face that neutralized his really
pleasant brown eyes and thick brown hair, which were his best features.
Manly the face was, but, except when speaking in unconscious
moments, dull and unstriking. A fellow three inches shorter, and
two-thirds his weight would have been called tall. "Big" was the
favorite adjective used in describing Peter, and big he was. Had he

gone through college ten years later, he might have won unstinted fame
and admiration as the full-back on the team, or stroke on the crew. In
his time, athletics were but just obtaining, and were not yet approved of
either by faculties or families. Shakespeare speaks of a tide in the
affairs of men. Had Peter been born ten years later the probabilities are
that his name would have been in all the papers, that he would have
weighed fifty pounds less, have been cheered by thousands, have been
the idol of his class, have been a hero, have married the first girl he
loved (for heroes, curiously, either marry or die, but never remain
bachelors) and would have--but as this is a tale of fact, we must not
give rein to imagination. To come back to realism, Peter was a hero to
nobody but his mother.
Such was the man, who, two weeks after graduation from Harvard, was
pacing up and down the deck of Mr. Pierce's yacht, the "Sunrise," as
she drifted with the tide in Long Island Sound. Yet if his expression, as
he walked, could for a moment have been revealed to those seated aft,
the face that all thought dull and uninteresting would have riveted their
attention, and set each one questioning whether there might not be
something both heroic and romantic