"So do I," drawled Rattleton; "what a bully excuse a fellow would have had for not getting his degree."
"What an excitement there must have been," went on Gray, without noticing the interruption. "Just think of being cheered out of the Yard when you left for the war, and then perhaps distinguishing yourself, and coming back to Class Day with your arm in a sling."
"Just think of coming back in a pine-box," added Hudson, graphically.
"Well, suppose you did? You have got to die some time, and your name would have been put on a tablet in memorial."
"Yes, but you wouldn't have been tickled by seeing it there," said the irritating Stoughton. "Half your patriotism is vanity, Ernest, you shallow theatrical poser."
"It would do you men good to read the Memorial Biographies," Gray continued, now thoroughly aroused, and paying no attention to the side remarks. "They ought to be part of the prescribed work for a degree."
"Yes, but as Hudson says, you couldn't do that if you were a biographee," reasoned Dane Austin, the law-school man, taking a hand in the baiting.
"It would be perfectly disgusting to hear you fellows talk this way," Gray declared, "if one didn't know that it was all affectation. I am not sure that that fact does not make it worse. You all really feel just as I do, but you are afraid to say so."
"Another appalling case of Harvard indifference," observed Stoughton. "The modern dilettante has no noble desire for red war."
"He likes to make people believe that he has no noble desire for anything, and he has a morbid fear of being a hypocrite. As a matter of fact, you are all of you the worst kind of hypocrites, for you try to appear worse than you are."