College freshmen -- Juvenile fiction; College stories; Male friendship -- Juvenile fiction
“Well,” Dick retorted, “that’s just what I’m scrapping about. You
won’t get the worth of it if you go on cutting out a good half of what
college ought to mean to a fellow. I’ll bet you fairly ache to go on
the field every time the bunch takes a try-out.”
“If I do, I take it out in aching,”――glumly.
It was the same old thing. As the son of a workingman, Larry, as we
have seen, had early drawn a line upon the off side of which he had
taken his stand stubbornly. College, as it appeared to him, was a place
where rich men’s sons came to study as little as possible, and where a
workingman was admitted only upon sufferance, as you might say.
Now when a fellow goes about with a chip on his shoulder there are
plenty of people who will oblige him by knocking it off. Larry had
already had kindnesses not a few shown him, and even hilarious
adulation when――dragged into it bodily by Dick――he had taken part in
the class “scrap,” and had led the green-caps to the first Freshman
victory won in eight years. But, on the other hand, a few snobbish
fellows had “shown him his place,” as he put it, and it is human nature
to see the thing you are looking for, and to miss the things you’ve
already made up your mind don’t exist.
“I don’t think you’re doing yourself, or Old Sheddon, fair justice,”
Dick said at length. “If you were thick-headed and had to bone hard to
keep up, it would be different. But you’re not――and you don’t.”
“Listen,” said Larry; “those fellows in the athletic bunch are out
after ‘material,’ but that is just as far as it goes, Dick. They’d take
me on as a sort of promising chunk of bone and muscle――and that’s all.
I’m not in their class.”
Dick flapped his hands in despair.
“You’re the limit, Larry! That ‘class’ notion of yours, in free-for-all
America, is simply bunk!”
“Is it?” Larry queried sharply. “I can prove what I say. Look at little
Purdick――waiting on table in Hassler’s restaurant to earn his way: does
anybody ask him to get in on any of the try-outs? Not so you could
notice it. Look at Jungman, tending furnaces and wheelbarrowing ashes:
Saturday, when some of the fellows were going for a hike, one of ’em
said: ‘Let’s make Jungman take time off and go with us.’ Were there any
frantic shouts of approval? Not on your life. Instead, Banker Waldrich
said, ‘Oh, nit! he isn’t our sort.’”
Again Dick made the gesture of despair.
“I guess you’re hopeless!” he gave up; and with that he went to get his
own book.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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