and sulking, only after ultimatums from his self-made and apoplectic father.
On Harold Lamb's crucial March afternoon, Harlow Gaines, principal and chief professor in the Sanford High School, asked Harold to remain for a few minutes after the class in Senior English.
Gaines was thirty-two years of age and looked ten years older. He wore gold-rimmed eyeglasses with a black cord fastened to them. A lock of blond hair drooped over his forehead. From the cradle he was destined to be principal of a four-room high school in a middle western town of the size of Sanford. He taught English, Latin, French, German, physics, and chemistry; he also coached the baseball and football teams. This latter task he performed very badly, for he had played neither game himself. But the other two teachers in the Sanford High School were women, so Gaines got the coaching assignment.
He boarded with the Picketts, two houses from the school. Mrs. Pickett reported that Gaines spent all his spare time and cash on thick, depressing-looking books, some of them not even in English, and was hence "a very smart man." To corroborate this. Professor Gaines never spoke in words of one syllable when three syllables would do just as well.
