“Whether he did the same thing or not,” replied Peck, coolly, “Mulcahy is a mucker.”
“The real difference is that Mulcahy works his way and Putnam doesn’t,” asserted Sam, warmly.
Duncan smiled scornfully. “The real difference is that Mulcahy works other people and Putnam doesn’t!”
“Putnam doesn’t have to,” retorted Sam.
“Neither does Mulcahy.”
“Why, he has to earn every cent he spends,” returned Sam, eagerly. “It takes a lot more stuff in you to do that than to wear good clothes and keep your hands white on the money your father gives you. It’s these fellows who earn their way who do things when they get into real work. They’re used to hard knocks, and they go straight ahead when fellows like Putnam flat out. That’s proved by the whole history of the Academy.”
“What’s proved by the whole history of the Academy?” asked Peck, with irritating calmness.
“Why, that fellows that earn their way make the most successful men.”
“I haven’t said a word against fellows who earn their own way,” retorted Peck, sharply. “They may make the most successful men and they may not. I don’t care anything about that. But if you think that the history of the Academy proves that every scholarship fellow becomes a great and good man, you’re sadly off. The scholarship fellows are of all kinds—good, bad, and indifferent. Some are nice fellows; some are dead beats, getting their board and clothes off the Academy because it’s less work and more fun than it would be to milk cows or work in the shoe-shop; some seem to be training for crooks or anarchists. They work their way because they have to, that’s all. You don’t suppose they prefer it, do you?”
“Mulcahy plays football, and is on the ‘Seatonian,’ and does well in his studies, and he is a good speaker in the Laurel Leaf,” remarked Archer, feeling suddenly his inexperience, and returning to the personal example when general assertion proved unsafe. “He amounts to more than Kendrick, and yet you don’t make any objection to Kendrick.”