“Well,” said Dick, grinning, “they get the pick of the fellows from each incoming class, or try to: why shouldn’t they be better than the leavings?”
Larry’s answering grin was perfectly good-tempered. They had threshed this matter out a good many times in the past.
“Present company excepted, I take it,” he put in, adding: “I’m one of the ‘leavings,’ you know.”
Dick sat down, chuckling delightedly.
“I just wanted to see how you’d take that,” he explained. “You have the one big necessary qualification—angelic humility. You’ll do, all right.”
“Do for what?”
Dick got up and put an arm across Larry’s shoulders.
“You hump-backed old greasy grind!” he chanted; “did you swallow the notion that I was going to duck out and leave you to wallow all alone in the mire of your own splendiferous conceit? It’s a dead secret yet, but I’m allowed to whisper it to you. You’re due to get a bid to the Omegs yourself!”
For a little time Larry merely stared down at the demonstration drawing he was making and said nothing. For a fellow with a good bit of Celtic blood in his veins, he was a trifle slow in grasping the full significance of a thing. As we have seen, Dick’s charge that he was prejudiced against the Greek-Letter fraternities was quite true. Moreover, he believed that his argument against them was sound: that they did make for a drawing apart and the formation of small cliques. And beyond this, there was that workingman’s grudge. If the fraternities were not all made up of the sons of rich men and money-spenders, the one or two that he knew most about seemed to lean that way; and, quite as certainly, some of their members looked down as “riff-raff” upon the “leavings,” which, in Old Sheddon, as in many other universities and colleges, comprised a good half or more of the student body.
On the other hand ... well, up to that moment Larry hadn’t been admitting that there was any “other hand” worth mentioning; had fully and firmly decided that there couldn’t be—for him. Yet it takes a pretty strong resolution to be able to hold out when common old human vanity is appealed to. In a sort of flashlight picture Larry saw himself as one of the chosen ones, ensconced in the big, comfortable, not to say luxurious, frat house just across the street from the main entrance to the campus; still Dick’s loyal running mate and chum, and making good his standing with the other fellows in the house by winning an “S” for himself and the brotherhood in athletics.