Quarles smiled.
“That name was tacked on a year ago, when he was a Freshman. It seems that he kept himself to his room and never mixed in things, sort of a timid, bashful chap, but full of energy when it comes to study. A down-at-the-heels fellow, I have heard him called. Well, he was squeamish about everything, and it was natural for the Freshies to tack him with ‘Squeem’ and by that name he will always be known to the future generations of college men.”
“Here’s the alley!” I announced, after a few minutes more of talk. We had passed down an outlying road where, on the very outskirts of the village, stood a row of cheap tenements. Between these, at an angle, lay an alley filled with ashes, tin cans and broken bottles. This alley led up to two ill-looking shanties, so small that by comparison with the houses farther in the town they seemed no more than half-ruined doll houses.
“It’s the blackest house,” whispered my companion. “Go around to the rear. His room is up the back stairs.”
As we rounded the black shanty the sound of gurgling and churning reached our ears, and then, back of a line of flapping, wet clothes, we came on a middle-sized, but excessively gaunt youth, wearing an oil-cloth apron, such as we wore in the chemistry classes when we performed experiments, with a bib that fitted close to his neck. He wore under it a ragged, red sweater, and was churning a washing machine full of clothes, while, at his back, a stout, red-faced Irishwoman was engaged in taking clothes from a basket and hanging them on lines. Hanging from a row of nails on the outside of the house were all shades and colors of students’ laundry bags. Underneath them, wriggling in a broken and dirty clothes basket, lay a six-months-old baby, sucking a soiled thumb and apparently finding it nourishing.
“Hello, Quarles!” greeted the washerman, in great embarrassment at our discovery of him, “I didn’t expect you!” A Southern drawl was evident in his speech. He was about to take off his apron, when the Irishwoman, throwing a frown of dissatisfaction in my direction, growled:
“Mister Hirshey, an’ don’t you be lavin’, mind you. Them things’ve got to be done. You can talk while you work; but work you must, and the young gentlemen can go hang till you’ve time, if they care!”
Squeem’s waxen cheeks, which seemed before to have no signs of blood about them, flushed, and he said, apologetically, as he resumed his churning,
“Only ten minutes more, Quarles. We can talk, and then we can go to the room.”
I was introduced to the student and recognized in him the one whom I had passed on the campus, time and time again in the winter, with his shivering body fitted to ill-measured clothes, and his goose-fleshed wrists and ungloved hands hanging like dead weights from below his coat sleeves.