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“None of that from you, Dick!” he growled. “I know just how much and how little all this shouting and yelling is worth, and so do you. To-morrow morning nine-tenths of those fellows won’t know me when they meet me on the campus. For just about that percentage of them I’ll drop back and be just what I am—a workingman and the son of a workingman. They wanted a hard-hitter to-night, and I happened to be it. But that’s all there is to it. No more rah-rah stuff for me.”

“But you can’t—you simply can’t go through college with that sort of a slant on things!” Dick protested, almost tearfully. “It isn’t human! You’re simply batty on that ‘workingman’ stunt. Why, those fellows you captained to-night will black your shoes—do anything on top of earth for you, if you’ll only let ’em!”

But “letting them” was the hitch that Larry Donovan, in the very beginning of his college career, was allowing the stubborn part of his own character to knot around him. There is no variety of pride quite so unreasoning as poverty-pride; and when Larry tumbled into bed a little later, it was with the fixed idea that he was going to be in college without being of it; that he would hoe his own row and let others do the same; a determination which, farther along, was to lead to—but of that more in its proper place.