His story was as ordinary and prosaic as Mr. and Mrs. Pierce seemed to think his character.  Neither riches nor poverty had put a shaping hand to it.  The only child of his widowed mother, he had lived in one of the smaller manufacturing cities of New England a life such as falls to most lads.  Unquestionably he had been rather more shielded from several forms of temptation than had most of his playmates, for his mother’s isolation had made him not merely her son, but very largely her companion.  In certain ways this had tended to make him more manly than the average fellow of his age, but in others it had retarded his development; and this backwardness had been further accentuated by a deliberate mind, which hardly kept pace with his physical growth.  His school record was fair:  “Painstaking, but slow,” was the report in studies.  “Exemplary,” in conduct.  He was not a leader among the boys, but he was very generally liked.  A characteristic fact, for good or bad, was that he had no enemies.  From the clergyman to the “hired help,” everybody had a kind word for him, but tinctured by no enthusiasm.  All spoke of him as “a good boy,” and when this was said, they had nothing more to say.

One important exception to this statement is worthy of note.  The girls of the High School never liked him.  If they had been called upon for reasons, few could have given a tangible one.  At their age, everything this world contains, be it the Falls of Niagara, or a stick of chewing gum, is positively or negatively “nice.”  For some crime of commission or omission, Peter had been weighed and found wanting.  “He isn’t nice,” was the universal verdict of the scholars who daily filed through the door, which the town selectmen, with the fine contempt of the narrow man for his unpaid “help,” had labelled, “For Females.”  If they had said that he was “perfectly horrid,” there might have been a chance for him.  But the subject was begun and ended with these three words.  Such terseness in the sex was remarkable and would have deserved a psychological investigation had it been based on any apparent data.  But women’s opinions are so largely a matter of instinct and feeling, and so little of judgment and induction, that an analysis of the mental processes of the hundred girls who had reached this one conclusion, would probably have revealed in each a different method of obtaining this product.  The important point is to recognize this consensus of opinion, and to note its bearing on the development of the lad.

That Peter could remain ignorant of this feeling was not conceivable.  It puzzled him not a little when he first began to realize the prejudice, and he did his best to reverse it.  Unfortunately he took the very worst way.  Had he avoided the girls persistently and obviously, he might have interested them intensely, for nothing is more difficult for a woman to understand than a woman-hater; and from the days of mother Eve the unknown is rumored to have had for her sex a powerful fascination.  But he tried to win their friendship by humbleness and kindness, and so only made himself the more cheap in their eyes.  “Fatty Peter,” as they jokingly called him, epitomized in two words their contempt of him.