“I know you’re a howling crank about ’em. You haven’t a single argument against ’em that’ll hold water.”
“Sure I have. But I haven’t time to trot them out for you now. Got these themes to chew on, and after that——”
“Yes; and after that, your lame dogs will begin to string in. You’ve got the wrong slant on the cripples, Larry; the faculty has the right one. If a fellow can’t keep up with the parade, out he goes. And he ought to go.”
“I can’t see it that way—not for the kind of fellows who have taken to dropping in here. They want to stay in college—want to make good. And most of ’em only need a little boosting and jacking up.”
“Well,” said Dick, hustling into his good clothes, “I’m mighty glad I don’t have to look at it through your spectacles. I don’t want to be a pack-mule before my time.”
When he was left alone, Larry dug for the themes. English was his “black beast,” as a Frenchman would put it, and he had to work like a Turk for it—that is, if Turks ever do work. In his time—which was only yesterday—managers of the nation’s great industries were beginning to say that the technical colleges were paying too little attention to English; that they were turning out engineers who couldn’t write an ordinary, every-day business letter. Hence the technicals, Old Sheddon among them, were stressing the English course.
Larry’s home surroundings hadn’t been particularly conducive to the growth of literary English. In the Donovan home “ain’t” and “he don’t” and “might of” had their places at the fireside, along with split infinitives, plural verbs in the wrong places, “let him and I,” telephone answers like “this is him,” and a lot of other expressions that the grammar books call “colloquialisms.” So he had to labor pretty heavily in “English I.”
But in Mathematics it was exactly the other way around. Here the big, athletic Freshman soon became known as a “shark,” and a good-natured “shark” is an institution not to be undervalued in any college. Before the foot-ball season closed, Larry was acquiring a small following of “lame dogs”; fellows who had to be helped over the stile, if they were going to get over at all; hence, Dickie Maxwell’s wail about pack-mules and such.
Down underneath the good-nature which prompted these helpings, Larry had a sort of ill-defined motive which was more or less to his credit. As a son of a workingman he had entered college with the feeling that he was going to be looked down upon, and certain fellows with more money than sense had either thoughtlessly or maliciously helped the feeling to grow. But in the better part of him, Larry was too square and man-sized to become that bitterest of all things, the college grouch, so he had begun to open out a bit on the side of the helpings, this though he was still hanging on to the idea that between the son of an ex-locomotive engineer and, let us say, a member of the richest Greek-Letter fraternity, there was a gulf fixed, great and impassable.
Dick had been gone a full hour, and the second of the English themes was well on its way to completion when the door opened and little Purdick slid in. At first sight, anybody would have said that Charles Purdick had certainly missed the mark by a broad mile in choosing an engineering course. Undersized, with a thin, eager face and pale-blue, tired eyes, he looked more like a candidate for a sanitarium than anything else.