Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) (276 page)

Benjamin's
growing
unhappiness
at
home
was
compensated
for
by his
many
new
interests.
He
took
up
golf
and
made
a
great
success of
it.
He
went
in
for
dancing:
in
1906
he
was
an
expert
at
"The Boston,"
and
in
1908
he
was
considered
proficient
at
the
"Maxixe," while
in
1909
his
"Castle
Walk"
was
the
envy
of
every
young
man
in town.

His
social
activities,
of
course,
interfered
to
some
extent
with
his business,
but
then
he
had
worked
hard
at
wholesale
hardware
for twenty-five
years
and
felt
that
he
could
soon
hand
it
on
to
his
son, Roscoe,
who
had
recently
graduated
from
Harvard.

He
and
his
son
were,
in
fact,
often
mistaken
for
each
other.
This pleased
Benjamin—he
soon
forgot
the
insidious
fear
which
had
come over
him
on
his
return
from
the
Spanish-American
War,
and
grew to
take
a
naive
pleasure
in
his
appearance.
There
was
only
one
fly in
the
delicious
ointment—he
hated
to
appear
in
public
with
his
wife. Hildegarde
was
almost
fifty,
and
the
sight
of
her
made
him
feel absurd.
.
.
.

9

One
September
day
in
1910—
a
few
years
after
Roger
Button
&
Co., Wholesale
Hardware,
had
been
handed
over
to
young
Roscoe
Button —a
man,
apparently
about
twenty
years
old,
entered
himself
as
a freshman
at
Harvard
University
in
Cambridge.
He
did
not
make
the mistake
of
announcing
that
he
would
never
see
fifty
again
nor
did
he mention
the
fact
that
his
son
had
been
graduated
from
the
same
institution
ten
years
before.

He
was
admitted,
and
almost
immediately
attained
a
prominent position
in
the
class,
partly
because
he
seemed
a
little
older
than
the other
freshmen,
whose
average
age
was
about
eighteen.

But
his
success
was
largely
due
to
the
fact
that
in
the
football
game with
Yale
he
played
so
brilliantly,
with
so
much
dash
and
with
such a
cold,
remorseless
anger
that
he
scored
seven
touchdowns
and
fourteen
field
goals
for
Harvard,
and
caused
one
entire
eleven
of
Yale
men to
be
carried
singly
from
the
field,
unconscious.
He
was
the
most celebrated
man
in
college.

Strange
to
say,
in
his
third
or
junior
year
he
was
scarcely
able
to "make"
the
team.
The
coaches
said
that
he
had
lost
weight,
and
it seemed
to
the
more
observant
among
them
that
he
was
not
quite as
tall
as
before.
He
made
no
touchdowns—indeed,
he
was
retained on
the
team
chiefly
in
hope
that
his
enormous
reputation
would
bring terror
and
disorganization
to
the
Yale
team.

In
his
senior
year
he
did
not
make
the
team
at
all.
He
had
grown so
slight
and
frail
that
one
day
he
was
taken
by
some
sophomores for
a
freshman,
an
incident
which
humiliated
him
terribly.
He
became
known
as
something
of
a
prodigy—a
senior
who
was
surely
no more
than
sixteen—and
he
was
often
shocked
at
the
worldliness
of some
of
his
classmates.
His
studies
seemed
harder
to
him—he
felt
that they
were
too
advanced.
He
had
heard
his
classmates
speak
of
St. Midas',
the
famous
preparatory
school,
at
which
so
many
of
them had
prepared
for
college,
and
he
determined
after
his
graduation
to enter
himself
at
St.
Midas',
where
the
sheltered
life
among
boys
his own
size
would
be
more
congenial
to
him.