"Well, how are you, old top?" was the greeting that came singing from his room, each time I passed its open door. It was a door perennially open, lest some passerby might escape without the greeting.
"D'you know, old chap," he'd say, sweeping into my room in the midst of a study-hour and slumping down upon the divan with a great show of silk socks and shirtings, "it's high time you and I did something for that 'grind' across the hall."
He was tremendously interested in Fallon, it would appear. Not personally, he explained to me—but just because Fallon might become a valuable friend in time. A college man needed friends—and he, Waters, had only four hundred of them!
Fallon, however, had something of his own opinion about it. He went about the building with his book before him, bowing neither to me nor Waters nor any one else. It was dreadful to have to speak to him. He could scarcely answer; his big Adam's-apple would go juggling painfully up and down, and finally he would succeed in emitting a barely audible whisper. He would blush, stammer, clap his mouth shut, then hurry away.
That was Fallon, worst of "grinds." He was beginning to be the butt of all sorts of miserable jokes. Even the freshmen over-stepped the line to make fun of him. For, like Waters and myself, he was a sophomore.
In the guise of helping a classmate, Waters took charge of him. He gave him nightly lectures in cordiality, in self-confidence, in the bettering of one's appearance. Once, when I chanced to go by, I heard him delivering glib advice upon what "Fallon, old top" ought to eat, in order that he might grow stouter and more favorable to look upon. And Fallon sat through it all and clutched his bony knees and grinned the grin of the helpless.
But one day, the story goes, he surprised Waters by finding his voice—and a very full-toned, convincing voice it proved to be, not at all like his usual whisper. And he told Waters to keep out of his room in study hour; he told him that he did not care to have his chances of becoming class valedictorian spoiled through having to divert his attention and listen to such superficial tommy-rot. And he told him to keep himself away, now and forever more, from his room and its owner.
"Oh, very well!" I heard the injured Waters say. A second later he had come across into my room and was pouring into my ear a complaint concerning the beggarly rudeness of that "grind, Fallon, who never would amount to anything in the college world, anyhow!"
He had just returned from a very important meeting, he told me, for the express purpose of having that heart-to-heart talk with Fallon—and the big, uncouth beggar didn't appreciate it at all. No wonder some fellows never did get along in college—and here he was, absent from this most important meeting, with no results at all.
He didn't mind telling me—(here his voice died down into an impressive whisper)—that it was from a fraternity meeting he had come. They were great things, these fraternity meetings. It was really too bad that I had never been able to join a fraternity—but then, of course, I must realize that fraternities had to draw the line somewhere! Now, I mustn't take that as a reflection on me personally—because it wasn't. I was all right, I was—and some day, he was sure, I was going to be a big man in the college world—bigger than he himself ever hoped to be. But Jews were a funny people—and I must admit, if I wanted to be fair, that some of them weren't fit to come to college at all, not to speak of joining fraternities.