“You didn’t turn out for the bridge scrap, did you, Purdy?” said Larry, as they hoisted themselves to seats on the approach parapet where he and Dick Maxwell had sat through a pretty painful session one evening some few weeks earlier.
“You know I didn’t. About that time o’ night I was washing dishes in Hassler’s kitchen.”
“But you’ll be in the next one. We’ll be the defenders next fall, and we want to keep those old figures up there for another year.”
“Lot of good I’d be!” scoffed the small one. “If we should happen to get a few grasshoppers in the next Freshman class, perhaps I might be able to pull a leg off of one or two of ’em. But that’s about all.”
“Size isn’t everything,” Larry offered. Having plenty of it himself, he could easily disregard the lack of it in others. Then: “Have you always been off weight, Purdy?”
“Ever since I can remember. My mother was small.”
In all their close association as room-mates Purdick had rarely talked of himself or his past, and never of his people. But now, perhaps because the parting for the summer was so near at hand, he let out a little.
“We were poor folks,” he went on; “poor in the way you don’t know anything about, because your father had a trade and a good one. Mine was a day laborer, and there were seven mouths to fill.”
“Five children?” said Larry. “That’s our number at home.”
“That was our number, but it isn’t any more; there are only two of us now—my sister Alice and I.”