It was after supper on the day when they got their assignments, and the two had gone to their room to “chop the first air-hole in the study ice,” as Dick put it, that Larry’s attitude got its first public airing, so to speak. And some mention of the impending bridge scrap was what opened the door.
“No,” said Larry, frowning, “I’m not in on that, or any other side-line foolishness, Dick. As I told Merkle that first evening, I’m not here to play horse. My assignment card is full enough to keep me good and busy, and if I can claw through this first semester without flunking something, I’ll be lucky.”
Dick squared himself behind the study table and looked his room-mate in the eye.
“You’re side-stepping, Larry,” he broke out accusingly. “It isn’t the work that makes you say that. You know perfectly well that you can run rings all around me, with your little ‘it’s dogged as does it,’ when it comes to the study part. You’ve got some other reason up your sleeve. What is it?”
Larry tried to set the real reason in presentable shape. But, after all, it didn’t sound so very good when he voiced it.
“I was a workingman before I came here, and I’m a workingman yet.”
“Granny!” Dick scoffed. “We’re all workingmen—or, if we’re not, we’d better be.”
“You know what I mean,” Larry insisted; adding: “I’m not kicking. It’s the way it is out in the world, and I suppose there is no reason why it shouldn’t be that way in college. You’ve made an armful of friends already, while I know maybe half a dozen fellows well enough to nod at ’em. Sometimes they nod back, and sometimes they don’t.”
“Fiddle!”—Dick seemed to be carrying an overload of derisive ejaculations. “You’ve simply got the bug, Larry! If you let it keep you from being a real Sheddonian—pep, college spirit and all—it’ll bust you, world without end.”
“I can’t help it,” said the workingman glumly. “I didn’t make things the way they are made. Here’s a sample of it: You’ve met Eggleston—the dandified chap that rooms two doors down the street. I happened to butt up against him to-day, and he introduced himself and asked if I were the son of Mr. Herbert Donovan, the big consulting engineer, of St. Louis. When I said No; that my father was a locomotive engineer; he froze up until you could hear his skin crack.”