"I don't see how I am to go home!" he said. "I don't know what my mother will say!"
While another, who had got a turn-back, liked so little what his mother did say that he gave her a sharp little lecture on the Graduation ground.
"I can't tell what makes you go on so!" he burst forth. "I'm only turned back. Lots of men are sent away altogether. Why do you talk like that? What's the matter?"
Poor mothers! It is often pathetic to hear them explain the case to other people.
"He's a good boy, Miss Smith; but you know he has always been delicate. Hard study never agreed with him." (True, this last.)
"You see, Mrs. Brown, he has had such trouble with his eyes that I wonder he has kept up at all. I really must speak to the Superintendent about the study lights. Then these early recitations. Why, at home we never thought of waking him up till eight o'clock, and then gently, you know, and by degrees. And now he says that gun just goes through his head without a word of preparation. I suppose, really, that is what ails his eyes."
"Everything here is so wretchedly mismanaged!" commented a wise and sympathetic damsel. "The cadets are abused at every turn. I don't see how they stand it. It is the meanest place!"
"Well, I've done what I could to straighten things," said a beaming matron. "Look at this bag,—absolutely worn out in the service. It has brought Tom everything—from cigars up. And when he wants money, he has only to say so."
Strange, that with such care Tom should ever grumble at anything—especially regulations.
But graduation has come and gone, the graduates have scattered; some for home, some for Europe, some to be married "on graduation leave." For three months they have "the world before them, where to choose."