He walked swiftly down Williams Street to his room, not once lifting his eyes from the pavement, which was dirty white from the much trampled snow.
Another flunk! The third in as many weeks! Catherwood with a muttered imprecation reviewed the succession of class-room disasters.
"Confound history!" he growled as he strode into his room. He flung his books upon the bed and himself into the deep Morris chair by the window. A sparrow was hopping on the porch roof without. He rattled the window violently and the sparrow flew away in fright.
"Go it, you imp," he snarled; and again he condemned all history and its study to the deepest depths.
It was bad. The assistant professor had been lenient, but fate seemed to have composed that particular section of every history hater in the junior class.
Catherwood realized this—or thought he did—as he sat staring out of the windows into the skeleton branches of the trees, and from the thought he obtained a modicum of consolation.
He had worked. He had worked hard—but for some unknown reason he couldn't bite into the course, couldn't dig his teeth into the subject. He did not fear; on the contrary he was certain—as certain as a man can be—that his semester's work in class-room was of sufficiently high a grade to assure him his full credit in the course. And yet, he considered, there was the examination, five days away. In two hours he would be required to write out in a thin "blue book" all he was supposed to have learned in twenty weeks.
He ruminated.
How much of what he had learned had stopped in his head? He asked himself this, seriously, then smiled. He confessed to himself that he had worked merely from recitation to recitation with no effort to hold the subjects in that mathematical brain of his that caused his forehead to bulge.