Professor Mackail protested furiously, but his advocacy only embittered Litton—for Mackail was the leader of the faction that had tried for years to place Webster University in line with others by removing Latin and Greek from the position of required studies.
Mackail and his crew pretended that French and German, or science, were appropriate substitutes for the classic languages in the case of those whose tastes were not scholastic; but to Litton it was a religion that no man should be allowed to spend four years in college without at least rubbing up against Homer, Æschylos, Vergil, and Horace.
As Litton put it: "No man has a right to an Alma Mater who doesn't know what the words mean; and nobody has a right to graduate without knowing at least enough Latin to read his own diploma."
This old war had been fought with all the bitterness and professional jealousies of scholarship, which rival those of religion and exceed those of the stage. For yet a while Litton and his followers had vanquished opposition. He little dreamed what he was preparing for himself in punishing Teed.
Teed accepted his banishment with poor grace, but a magnificent determination to come back and graduate. The effect of his punishment was shown when, after six months of rustic meditation, he set out for the university, leaving behind him his Fannie, who had been too timid to return to the scene of her discomfiture. Teed's good-by words ran something like this:
"Bess its ickle heartums! Don't se care! Soonie as Teedle-weedle gets graduated he'll get fine job and marry his Fansy-pansy very first sing." Then he kissed her "Goo'byjums"—and went back with the face of a Regulus returning to be tortured by the enemy.
II
Teed had a splendid mind for everything material and modern, but he could not and would not master the languages he called dead. His mistranslations of the classics were themselves classics. They sent the other students into uproars; but Litton saw nothing funny in them. When he received Teed's examination papers he marked them with a pitiless exactitude.
Teed reached the end of his junior year with a heap of conditions in the classics. Litton insisted that he should not be allowed to graduate until he cleaned them up. This meant that Teed must tutor all through his last vacation or carry double work throughout his senior year—when he expected to play some patriotic or Alma-Matriotic football.
Teed had no intention of enduring either of these inconveniences; he trusted to fate to inspire him somehow with some scheme for attaining his diploma without delay. His future job depended on his diploma—and his girl depended on his job.