Thropper went over to his desk and secured a brown-backed account book, and read off the following list:
“Stacking books in the library, twelve cents an hour. Wheeling Professor Dix’s invalid aunt in wheel chair, twelve cents an hour and dinner. Scrubbing floors in University Hall, twelve cents an hour. Weeding garden, cutting sugar-cane, thawing frozen gas pipes, grading lawn, kneading bread, cleaning black-boards, ringing bell, watchman, running washing-machines, errands, pruning trees, dusting Professor Harvey’s insects; all twelve cents an hour, Priddy. The list of my chores for last year. Possibilities for you, my boy!”
“Oh, I see!”
“Feel better, now?”
I smiled and then said, feelingly, to my roommate:
“Thropper, you’d be worth ten dollars an hour in a hospital bracing up discouraged financiers; that you would!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered, pleased with what I said. “I’ve been up against it myself, Priddy. I understand, that’s all.”
“Have been up against it?” I gasped. “Thropper, I guess you should put it in the present tense: are up against it. Here is your fifteen cents, your present fortune. What are you going to do about money?”
“Oh, me?” He felt under his table and brought out to view a tin lunch box made to resemble a bundle of school books. “I’ll have that filled on Saturday morning at six o’clock, put on these—” he rumbled behind his clothes-screen and threw a pair of dirty overalls on the floor and a soft, black shirt—“and go to my regular Saturday job in the glass factory. A dollar and fifty for the day; regular as the week comes around. That’s the way I take care of myself, Priddy!”
“But when I work for the University I don’t get cash, do I, Thropper?”