That was the moment of all moments when he had to remember Monty Brown, Montmorency Haliburton Brown—to give him all of his name. Monty was the son of the Brewster night engine-hostler, and a little money left by a great-aunt for that particular purpose had taken Monty to an Eastern college. Larry had a sudden mental flashlight picture of Monty Brown’s return to the bosom of his family for the long vacation the summer before; a be-tailored, be-barbered thing, smelling of pomatum, contemptuous of his good, honest, workaday family, and holding himself far too dandified to associate with his old school-fellows of the Brewster High. Was it possible that college could do such a thing as that for him—Larry Donovan? He set his teeth hard upon a resolve to turn his back squarely upon every influence that even threatened to lean that way.
Purdick’s little pipe-dream—about the big frat which shouldn’t be like the exclusive Greek Letters—he dismissed at once, though not without seeing what a chance it would offer for some real leader to do a fine thing for the “left-outs.” But he had the good sense to see that this was no job for a green Freshman, however popular he might be. It would need the prestige of an upperclassman—a Junior, at least—and even then it might have a hard row to hoe.
Notwithstanding the fact that his decision was now finally taken, it was a good bit of a trial to convince Dick that it was his job to tell the Zeta Omegas that, for reasons that needn’t be gone into, Freshman Larry Donovan did not wish to be considered as a candidate for fraternal honors. Of course Dick argued, painstakingly, almost pathetically. Being fully committed himself, he could see only one side of the argument, and he was convinced that Larry was throwing away his one best college chance. But Larry stood firm.
“It’s your everlasting ‘workingman’ prejudice, Larry!” Dick flamed out at the last. “You’d rather stand alone than come in with a bunch of fellows who have nothing against them except that, perhaps, some of them won’t have to work with their hands for a living when they get out of college!”
“Call it that if you want to,” said Larry; and he turned to his books with a frown and a sigh. He knew, of old, that it was no use to argue with Dick, and it was costing him something to realize that they had come to a parting of the ways; that the time was at hand when they would no longer be chums in that intimate chumminess which had held unbroken from the time when they had sat across the aisle from each other in the grade school at home.
A few days later the fraternity initiations—postponed that year rather beyond the usual period—began, and Larry saw numbers of his fellow classmen, Dick among them, doing all sorts of absurd and ridiculous “stunts” at all hours of the day and night; saw them and passed by with a grin in which there was a bit more than a tincture of good-natured contempt.
Next came the parting, when Dick packed up his belongings and moved them over to the big frat house opposite the campus portal on the other street. This was a sort of sorry business, as it was naturally bound to be, but of the two, Larry carried off his part of it rather better than Dick did.
“Have you made up your mind yet what you’re going to do?” Dick asked, as he was jamming the last of his things into his trunk and sitting on the lid to make the hasps catch.
“About the room, you mean? Mrs. Grant says I can keep it alone, but I know she can’t afford that.”
“I feel like a yellow dog, dropping out on her this way when it’s too late in the year for her to make other arrangements,” Dick said, getting up to stand on the trunk lid.