Gradually, of course, some mitigation came to this inveterate contempt;
gradually he did begin to distinguish between girls as such and women.
He saw that some such line of demarcation must be drawn but it was still
confused and hazy. Later on it was undoubtedly true that woman must play
some part in a man's life; this much he gathered from novels and the
ways of those giants to his imagination, the great Turkey Reiter and
Charlie de Soto.

Undoubtedly in the long process of evolution from the clam to the
stripling, morality was the contribution of the imitative monkey period
each boy passes as he merges towards perfect manhood. A thousand
supplications, commandings, and exhortations cannot accomplish what the
spectacle of a Turkey Reiter or a Charlie de Soto or a Dink Stover
instantly achieves in its casual Olympic passing. Such, with all due
respect to the efforts of secondary education, are the real moral forces
of youth.

When therefore Skippy had made choice of his heroes and slavishly set
himself in imitation, he had been unpleasantly disturbed by their
evident friendliness to the sex he despised and after much mental
perturbation perceived that sooner or later he, too, would share the
common lot and actually take pleasure in explaining to something pink
and white, with large rolling eyes and smiling teeth, that the game of
baseball is played with a ball and a bat and that the fielder and not
the batter is chasing the ball, that the difference between baseball and
football is that a baseball hurts the hands and a football hurts the
foot.

Some day when he grew to be Captain of the Eleven like Dink Stover
undoubtedly he would condescend to be gazed at and flattered and
fondled. If Dink Stover could stand the way Tough McCarthy's sister hung
on his arm and flirted openly before the whole school--why of course in
permitting such a display of affection Dink Stover was right, for Dink
Stover could do no wrong. Some day, then, like his hero, he would
condescend to be adored. Some day his turn would come as they sang at
the immortal Weber and Fields:

"For I must love some one,
And it may as well be you."

But all this was in the uncharted future. His attitude toward the sex
was still the attitude of normal soap-defying boyhood, defensive and
belligerent. Yet all this was to change, in the twinkling of an eye, in
one short season. The first great disillusionments of youth were at hand
and w