The two parted at the campus gate, and when Dick reached his room at Mrs. Grant’s, he found Larry scowling over a problem in his trigonometry.
“Chuck the grind and talk to me a few minutes,” was Dick’s greeting as he came in. Then: “You’re cutting all the athletic try-outs, Larry. What for?”
Larry’s frown deepened. “I don’t see why I can’t make you understand,” he broke out half impatiently. “You, and most of the other fellows, I’d say, are here mostly to have a good time—or that’s the way it looks to me. I’m not. I’m here on borrowed money—no, hold on,” he protested, when Dick would have interrupted, “I know your father doesn’t look at it that way, but I do. And because it is borrowed money, I want to get the worth of it.”
“Well,” Dick retorted, “that’s just what I’m scrapping about. You won’t get the worth of it if you go on cutting out a good half of what college ought to mean to a fellow. I’ll bet you fairly ache to go on the field every time the bunch takes a try-out.”
“If I do, I take it out in aching,”—glumly.
It was the same old thing. As the son of a workingman, Larry, as we have seen, had early drawn a line upon the off side of which he had taken his stand stubbornly. College, as it appeared to him, was a place where rich men’s sons came to study as little as possible, and where a workingman was admitted only upon sufferance, as you might say.
Now when a fellow goes about with a chip on his shoulder there are plenty of people who will oblige him by knocking it off. Larry had already had kindnesses not a few shown him, and even hilarious adulation when—dragged into it bodily by Dick—he had taken part in the class “scrap,” and had led the green-caps to the first Freshman victory won in eight years. But, on the other hand, a few snobbish fellows had “shown him his place,” as he put it, and it is human nature to see the thing you are looking for, and to miss the things you’ve already made up your mind don’t exist.
“I don’t think you’re doing yourself, or Old Sheddon, fair justice,” Dick said at length. “If you were thick-headed and had to bone hard to keep up, it would be different. But you’re not—and you don’t.”
“Listen,” said Larry; “those fellows in the athletic bunch are out after ‘material,’ but that is just as far as it goes, Dick. They’d take me on as a sort of promising chunk of bone and muscle—and that’s all. I’m not in their class.”