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“Don’t you go and lay that up against him,” Dick urged. “It’s—it’s just his way, you know.”

“Well, if anybody should ask me often enough, I’d say it’s a mighty queer way. Acts as if he had a grouch against the world.”

Dickie Maxwell, loyalest of chums, hardly knew what to say. Dixon was the son of a wealthy Kansas City packer, and Dick felt that it would be next to impossible to make him understand Larry’s attitude. For that matter, he, Dick, couldn’t understand it himself. Beginning with workmanlike contempt for what he called the “boys’-play” side of college life, Larry’s grouch, or indifference, or whatever it was, was developing into something a good bit like antagonism toward everything but the daily study grind, and what he could get out of that.

“I’ll say he’s heading in to be a worm,” Dixon went on; “worm” being Sheddon slang for a fellow who scamps the college “activities” and lives and moves and has his being in the classrooms and study periods. “He’s ripping material for the athletic squad, and if he had even a whiff of college spirit he’d be showing up in the try-outs. You ought to labor with him, Maxie; he’s needing it.”