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“I was a workingman before I came here, and I’m a workingman yet.”

“Granny!” Dick scoffed. “We’re all workingmen—or, if we’re not, we’d better be.”

“You know what I mean,” Larry insisted; adding: “I’m not kicking. It’s the way it is out in the world, and I suppose there is no reason why it shouldn’t be that way in college. You’ve made an armful of friends already, while I know maybe half a dozen fellows well enough to nod at ’em. Sometimes they nod back, and sometimes they don’t.”

“Fiddle!”—Dick seemed to be carrying an overload of derisive ejaculations. “You’ve simply got the bug, Larry! If you let it keep you from being a real Sheddonian—pep, college spirit and all—it’ll bust you, world without end.”

“I can’t help it,” said the workingman glumly. “I didn’t make things the way they are made. Here’s a sample of it: You’ve met Eggleston—the dandified chap that rooms two doors down the street. I happened to butt up against him to-day, and he introduced himself and asked if I were the son of Mr. Herbert Donovan, the big consulting engineer, of St. Louis. When I said No; that my father was a locomotive engineer; he froze up until you could hear his skin crack.”