Very sensibly, Larry tried to let it go at that; but, oddly enough, it refused to “go.” Day after day the failures continued, usually beginning with the shop work and then spreading, like a contagious disease, to everything else. In the foundry his flasks “fell down,” and the castings came out looking as if a dog had gnawed them. In the pattern shop, plane-irons that he had whetted to a razor-edge nicked and spoiled the job. In the machine shop it was even worse; every machine tool he tried to use bucked on him and ruined something.
Of course, there were consequences—mighty unpleasant ones. With poor markings, or what you might call no markings, he was called before the chief of the shop staff, warned once that he would have to pull his standing up, warned a second time, and then, one morning, a faculty notice came. He was falling below passing grades in everything but Mathematics. If he couldn’t do better, the faculty would reluctantly be obliged to conclude that he hadn’t sufficient preparation for a college course.
“I don’t know what is the matter with me,” he confessed to Dick on the day when the faculty notice came. “I’m just all shot to pieces. Why, Dick, I don’t know myself any more! Things that used to come as easy as rolling off a log stump me as if I’d never heard of them before.”
“Not sick, are you?” Dick queried sympathetically.
“Only in my fool head and hands. I break everything I touch; and when I get a question in class, I simply blow up. I don’t blame the professors. Anybody would think I was solid ivory from the neck up!”
Dick shook his head. “I can’t understand it any better than you can, Larry. But there’s a reason, if you could find it. You’re not worrying about anything, are you?”
“Home matters, you mean? There’s nothing to worry about at home. No; my grief is right here, with myself.” Then, with a look of wretchedness that was pretty foreign to the good, wide-set eyes: “It’ll break my heart, Dick, if I have to flunk out. And I’m headed straight for it now, sure as a gun!”
Dickie Maxwell got up and began to walk the floor with his hands in his pockets. Finally he said: “Say, Larry; how much do you know about Psychology?”
Larry grunted. “Nothing; except that I don’t take much stock in it. Why?”