Stover at Yale by Owen Johnson

After the drudgery of the football season he had a few short weeks of gorgeous idleness, during which he browsed through a novel a day, curled up on his window-seat, rolling tobacco clouds through the fog of smokers in the room. He had won his spurs and the right to lounge, and he looked forward eagerly to the rest of the year as a time for reading and the opening up of the friendships of which he had dreamed.

Old age settled down rapidly upon him, and at eighteen that malady appears in its most virulent form. Perhaps there was a little justification. The test he had gone through had educated him to self-control in its most difficult form. He was not simply the big man of the class, the first to emerge to fame, but the prospective captain of a future Yale eleven. A certain gravity was requisite -- moreover, it was due the University. To have seen the burning letters S-T-O-V-E-R actually vibrating on the front pages of metropolitan papers, to have gazed on his distinguished (though slightly smudged) features, ruined by an unfeeling photographer, but disputing nevertheless the public attention with statesmen and champions of the pugilistic ring -- to have felt these heavenly sensations at the age of eighteen could not be lightly disguised.