“Then you've come to the wrong shop,” James informed him dryly. “If you want to succeed at college you've got to do the things the other fellows do and you've got to do them the same way.”
“You mean I've got to travel in a rut?”
“Oh, well! That's a way of putting it. I mean that you have to accept customs and traditions. You have to work like the devil doing things that count. If you make the team you've got to think football, talk it, eat it, dream it.”
“But is it worth while?”
James waved his protest aside. “Of course it's worth while. Success always is. Get this in your head. Four-fifths of the fellows at college don't count. They're also-rans. To get in with the right bunch you've got to make a good showing. Look at me. I'm no John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Athletics bore me. I can't sing. I don't grind. But I'm in everything. Best frat. Won the oratorical contest. Manager of the football team next season. President of the Dramatic Club. Why?”
He did not wait for Jeff to guess the reason. “Because our set runs things and I go after the honors.”
“But a college ought to be a democracy,” Jeff protested.
“Tommyrot! It's an aristocracy, that's what it is, just like the little old world outside, an aristocracy of the survival of the fittest. You get there if you're strong. You go to the wall if you're weak. That's the law of life.”
The freshman came to this squint of pragmatism with surprise. He had thought of Verden University as a splendid democracy of intellectual brotherhood that was to leaven the world with which it came in touch.
“Do you mean that a fellow has to have money enough to make a good showing before he can win any of the prizes?”