"Oh, well, because you're a Freshman."
"But what right have they to make me take off my hat to them? They aren't any better than——"
"Because they're Sophomores. Come on, Billy." He opened the door. "You think it over, Young. Good-night. Glad to have met you, Young."
Then on his way downstairs he added to his friend Billy Nolan, "I like that big, green Freshman, but he needs hazing."
"He is rather fresh. Do you think we'll secure him, Jim?"
"But you can hardly blame him for taking himself so seriously," Linton went on as they gained the street "You see he has always lived at home, didn't go away to prep. school, was never guyed or anything of that sort in all his innocent life, and he doesn't know how to take it. He was an important person at home—probably led his class at the High School—has a lot of little brothers and sisters that bow down to him; and they've told him that he is a great man so often that he thinks there must be something in it. His hands show he has worked on a farm, but the palms are soft now—I noticed that shaking hands—so he's probably clerked in a store or taught school; yes, he's probably taught school."
Linton considered himself a student of human nature, and he did guess pretty well this time, though Young had no sisters and had never taught school.
"Anyway," he concluded, and in this he was right, perhaps, "college will be a great thing for him. No one ever made him realize his relative unimportance in the world."
"As we made big Bally realize it last year," interposed Nolan, smiling.
"Yes, and as we, too, were made to realize it the year before. My, what a big chump you'd have been, Billy, if you hadn't been hazed."