“You’ve made up your mind then, have you, Dick?”

Larry Donovan had his small drawing-board on the study table and was working out a tangled problem in “projections.” Dick Maxwell had just tossed his books aside and was walking the floor, hands in pockets; his habit when there was anything to be argued about.

“I don’t know why I shouldn’t fall all over myself to jump at the chance,” he returned. “Dad was a member of the Omegs, right here in Old Sheddon, and, as I’ve said, they’ve given me a bid. I think it’s mighty nice of the fellows.” Then: “I didn’t expect you’d give me the glad hand. You’ve been sort of prejudiced against the frats from the first, haven’t you?”

“Maybe some of it is prejudice,” Larry admitted, wanting to be perfectly fair; “but to me the whole fraternity idea seems to take a wrong shoot. If any place in the world ought to be democratic it’s a college. When little bunches of the fellows pull off to one side and shut out the rest ... well, that’s bad enough; but when, on top of that, they try to run things——”

“The fraternities don’t try to run anything but themselves,” Dick defended. “That’s only your idea, Larry.”

This was entirely true. When we look through the battered old telescope called Life, we see mostly what we are expecting to see; and with his workingman’s eye Larry wasn’t expecting to see much good in anything as exclusive as a fraternity.

“Maybe they don’t openly try to run things,” he countered. “But they stand together and hold themselves as being a lot better than us fellows on the outside. You know they do.”

“Well,” said Dick, grinning, “they get the pick of the fellows from each incoming class, or try to: why shouldn’t they be better than the leavings?”

Larry’s answering grin was perfectly good-tempered. They had threshed this matter out a good many times in the past.

“Present company excepted, I take it,” he put in, adding: “I’m one of the ‘leavings,’ you know.”

Dick sat down, chuckling delightedly.

“I just wanted to see how you’d take that,” he explained. “You have the one big necessary qualification—angelic humility. You’ll do, all right.”

“Do for what?”

Dick got up and put an arm across Larry’s shoulders.

“You hump-backed old greasy grind!” he chanted; “did you swallow the notion that I was going to duck out and leave you to wallow all alone in the mire of your own splendiferous conceit? It’s a dead secret yet, but I’m allowed to whisper it to you. You’re due to get a bid to the Omegs yourself!”

For a little time Larry merely stared down at the demonstration drawing he was making and said nothing. For a fellow with a good bit of Celtic blood in his veins, he was a trifle slow in grasping the full significance of a thing. As we have seen, Dick’s charge that he was prejudiced against the Greek-Letter fraternities was quite true. Moreover, he believed that his argument against them was sound: that they did make for a drawing apart and the formation of small cliques. And beyond this, there was that workingman’s grudge. If the fraternities were not all made up of the sons of rich men and money-spenders, the one or two that he knew most about seemed to lean that way; and, quite as certainly, some of their members looked down as “riff-raff” upon the “leavings,” which, in Old Sheddon, as in many other universities and colleges, comprised a good half or more of the student body.

On the other hand ... well, up to that moment Larry hadn’t been admitting that there was any “other hand” worth mentioning; had fully and firmly decided that there couldn’t be—for him. Yet it takes a pretty strong resolution to be able to hold out when common old human vanity is appealed to. In a sort of flashlight picture Larry saw himself as one of the chosen ones, ensconced in the big, comfortable, not to say luxurious, frat house just across the street from the main entrance to the campus; still Dick’s loyal running mate and chum, and making good his standing with the other fellows in the house by winning an “S” for himself and the brotherhood in athletics.

What if, after all, his ideas about the rich and poor distinctions were all wrong? It certainly looked that way when the exclusive Omegs were intending to give him a bid. So his protest, when he made it, was really no protest at all.

“If they should take me in, it would be entirely on your account, Dick; and I couldn’t stand for that.”

“Not by a thousand parasangs! Those things go by secret ballot; Carey Lansing explained all that. I had nothing to do with it—couldn’t have, because I’m only a ‘pledge’ myself.”

“Well, then, there’s the money. I’m a lot too poor to hold up my end with that bunch.”

Dick sat down and squared himself aggressively.

“Now, see here; let’s fight that out, once for all,” he argued. “Before we left home, my father, acting for the railroad company, offered to pay your way through college as a sort of prize for the good work you did last summer on the Little Ophir Extension. A week ago you told me you were sore at all the rich people, and were going to fling the money back in their faces and earn your own way.

“I hope you’ve thought better of that by this time; and if you have, I’ve only this to say: Dad expects you to have all the advantages here that I shall have; he told me so. He—or the company—will pay your frat dues just as cheerfully as they will your tuition and board bills—you know they will.”

Truly, Larry did know it; hence the knees of his continued protest grew weaker still.

“It’s kind of an honor, I guess,” he admitted soberly. “Yet I can’t change over all at once. I’m slow; slower than Christmas, Dick. You know that. I’ll have to have time to think it out.”

“Sure you will!” Dick agreed, reaching for his cap. And a moment later he was gone; to one of those social doings which were by this time cutting pretty deeply into his evening study hours.

Larry had been alone for some little time when his door opened to admit Havercamp, a Junior and the editor of the college paper.

“Hello, Donovan!” he boomed; and as Larry reached for a chair: “No, I can’t stop—just on my way over town to put the Micrometer to bed. What college activities are you in?”

Larry shook his head. “Trying to break into athletics a little, as you know.”

“Sure I know! Didn’t I see you put the wallop into the Rockford Poly game? That’s what brings me up here. I want you on the Micrometer—athletic reporter.”

“But, see here,” Larry objected; “I can’t write for little sour apples!”

“You’ll never learn any younger. Dig in and try it; you can begin right away and hash up something snappy about basket-ball. You know how the athletic frenzy dies out after foot-ball, and we want to keep the door slamming. Go to it; good exercise in English One. If you ball things up at first, we’ll help you out. That’s all. Good-night!”

Larry turned back to his work with a little prideful glow; added to that other glow which had come upon Dick’s announcement as to the intention of the Omegs. It was the first time he had been asked to take part on any of the extra-curriculum activities, and though he doubted his ability to write anything that anybody would print, he was perfectly willing to try.

Consequently, a little later he went over to the gymnasium where two of the basket-ball teams were practicing, got duly interested, and sat up until nearly midnight wrestling with his first attempt at writing for print, grinding out a couple of columns, which, by the way, Havercamp blue-penciled to a short and snappy stickful in the next issue of the Micrometer.

A couple of evenings after this, Larry found himself holding a reception—that is, a little bigger reception than usual—in his room at Mrs. Grant’s. Apart from the lame dogs, who came pretty regularly, sundry other fellows had discovered that Dick Maxwell’s red-headed room-mate was what you might call a heaven-born mathematician, that he was good-natured, and that an evening spent in his company was likely to result in better Math. markings for the spender.

For that reason the evening in-droppings were growing quite frequent, and when, on the night in question, the callers included Carey Lansing, a Senior, and Grand Satrap, or whatever you call it, of the Zeta Omegas, Larry thought nothing of it.

“Just wanted to see how you looked in action, Donnie,” Lansing said, explaining his own butt-in. “The fellows tell me you are a whale in Math. Where did you get it all?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Larry. “I never did have much trouble with figures.”

“You’re in luck. Freshman Math. is plenty stiff in Sheddon. I fell down all over it in my first year. I remember there was one problem—old ‘seven-fifty-four,’ we used to call it—that was a regular bear trap—caught the last man of us in my year.”

“Seven-fifty-four?” Larry queried. “Why, we have that in to-morrow’s assignment. Here it is,” and from a sheaf of demonstration sheets he took one covered handsomely with figures and illustrative drawings.

“That’s the old boy,” said Lansing, running his eye over the sheet; and from that he went on, talking easily of his Freshman days and their trials and tribulations.

As Lansing talked, Larry was watching the clock rather anxiously, hoping Dick would come in. In his bones he felt that Lansing was waiting for a chance to say something about the coming bid for membership in the Omegs—possibly the bid itself would be made. And Larry was not yet ready with his answer. Ambition, a keen hunger and thirst to be one of the particularized, was pulling one way, and something else—he couldn’t quite give it a definite name—was nervously putting the brakes on.

As it turned out, the clock-watching wasn’t needed. Dick came in before the room was cleared, so Larry had the excuse he had been waiting for; the chance to plead his Micrometer assignment and get away to the gymnasium without leaving his drop-ins with no host.

During the basket-ball practice games through which he sat making notes for Havercamp’s blue-pencilings, Problem 754, the one to which Lansing had called attention, was ambling around in the back part of his brain; and in the process of recalling it, step by step, it suddenly occurred to him that in a certain small particular the demonstration he had shown Lansing was at fault; the result was all right, but in one place the value of the x plus y had been assumed and not proved.

“Queer how I came to make such a bonehead crack as that,” he muttered, as he walked back across the campus; and when he reached his room and found everybody gone, and Dick—for a wonder—in bed and sound asleep, he looked on the study table for the demonstration sheet, meaning to correct the slip.

Oddly enough, the sheet wasn’t to be found. He had either misplaced it, or it had disappeared during his absence. Since it was wrong, anyhow, he did not search very long or carefully; instead, he sat down and painstakingly made another sheet, correcting the error that had appeared in the original; did that, and then went to bed and forgot the incident.

But the next day in class he was pointedly reminded of it. Blackboard demonstrations were called for and Problem 754 was given out. Having the processes at his finger-ends, Larry got through quickly and returned to his seat. Once there, it was only natural that he should look on to see how the other members of the section were getting along. To his astonishment he saw that three of the blackboard workers were demonstrating the problem exactly as he had done it on the sheet of paper that had disappeared; copying it precisely, with the x plus y error and all!

On a bit of paper torn from his scratch pad Larry jotted down the names of the men who were apparently copying from the lost sheet, and that evening, after supper, he asked Dick if he knew the names of the Freshmen who had already been pledged to the Zeta Omegas.

“Sure I do,” was the ready reply. “There are seven of us. Got a list somewhere. Here she is: I’ll call ’em off.”

Without explaining anything, Larry took out the list he had made in class and checked it silently as Dick read from his list. It came out exactly as he thought it would; the three men whose names he had written down were among the pledges to the Omegs. The double mystery of the disappearance of the faulty demonstration, and its reappearance in three separate places on the blackboards, was solved. Lansing had merely pocketed the solution, which he supposed was the correct one, and had given it to at least three of the Freshman pledges to his own fraternity.

It was altogether in keeping with Larry’s make-up that he did not explain his reason for wishing to know the names of the Omeg pledges; that Dick’s query as to what he was driving at should be given a “turn-off” answer. But the incident revived all those earlier and antagonistic questionings about the fraternities. Twist and turn it as he would, he couldn’t make Lansing’s action square with his own ideas of fairness.

But he was not quite fair himself in charging the act of one fellow up to a whole fraternity, or rather to fraternities as a whole—though this he did not realize. As he summed it up, it amounted to just this: if any member of a frat was able to “get by,” all the other members could get good marks without working for them; which, when you come to look at it, was putting a part for the whole with a vengeance—arguing a suit of clothes from a small bunch of wool on the sheep’s back, as you might say.

He did not go so far as to say that the incident would determine his action when, or if, the bid should be made. Nevertheless, it did set him balancing again on the fence of indecision. But, after all, it was little Purdick who gave him the push in the direction in which he was finally to fall.

It was two evenings later, and Purdick was the only drop-in; with Dick gone out somewhere, as was coming to be his nightly habit. After the sÉance with the trigonometry, which was Purdick’s bugbear, the handicapped one sat back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head.

“I’m making the most of you while I can, Donovan,” he said, with a tight-lipped smile. “When you hitch up with the Omegs I’ll lose you.”

“Who said I was going to hitch up with the Omegs?” Larry demanded.

“Oh, I don’t know just who said it; such things always get around.” Then: “I’m sorry.”

“What makes you sorry?”

“A lot of things that I have no right to say to an Omeg pledge.”

“I’m not a pledge—not yet.”

“You mean that I’m free to say what I please?”

“Sure you are. That is one of the privileges of this shop.”

“You’ll say I’m prejudiced, and maybe I am. But you must remember that I’m a year older in Sheddon than you are. I don’t condemn the frats as a whole; some fellows are just naturally joiners, and I suppose they can’t help it. But this particular frat, or at least the Sheddon chapter of it, stands for everything that I despise, Donovan. Two-thirds of the men in it are rich men’s sons, and the pace they set is pretty swift. Last year they lost four of their pledges—canned and sent home.”

“Why were they canned?”

“The faculty reason was that they fell short of classwork requirements. But the reason why they fell short can be jammed into one word—dissipation. Oh, you needn’t look so horrified; it was what they, and all their world, would call ‘gentlemanly’ dissipation; a little card-playing for money, a little drinking, occasional midnight suppers over in town—that sort of thing.”

“Do you mean to tell me that the faculty lets things of that kind go on, in a frat or out of it?” Larry demanded.

Again little Purdick’s smile was thin-lipped.

“Sheddon isn’t a training school for wayward youth, Donovan; it’s a college for men. Prexy will tell you that the faculty refuses to assume responsibility for your morals; that your character is supposed to be established before you come here. And he’ll probably add that your behavior off the campus will show up in your class markings, and that if these fall below the dead line—as they will if you run with the fast set—you’ll be sent home.”

“Short and sweet,” Larry commented with a grin.

Purdick was silent for a time. Then: “I’m sorry for another reason, Donovan. I thought you were one of us.”

“How do you mean?”

“You are a workingman, and the son of a workingman. You ought to stand with your class.”

“But if I don’t believe in ‘classes’?”

“You’ve got to believe in them, because they are. You can gloze it over all you want to, but that doesn’t change the fact. You’ve got to take sides, whether you want to or not.”

“I don’t see it that way at all,” said Larry stubbornly, meaning that he was beginning to try mighty hard not to see it that way.

“You’d better see it. You’re here for the same thing I am: that’s to get an education. If the doing of it is going to make you over into the kind of fellow that’s ashamed of his folks and the way they live and have to live—”

“That’ll be about enough of that kind of talk, Purdy,” Larry exploded. “I’m not built that way.”

Little Purdick closed his eyes.

“All right; we won’t argue about it. But I’ll take you on another tack. You may not know it, but you’ve already got a following here. I guess it began when you pulled the ’Varsity out of the hole in the Rockford Poly game; anyway, you’ve got it. If you really believe what you say—that there isn’t any such thing as ‘classes,’ or oughtn’t to be—it’s up to you to do the biggest thing that’s ever been done for Sheddon. But you’ll lose the chance if you go into a frat.”

Larry shook his head. “You’ve got me a mile over my depth, now, Purdy. What are you raving about?”

Purdick went on, still with his eyes closed.

“I can see you getting a bunch of the fellows—regular fellows—around you in a frat that would be a frat in the sure-enough meaning of the word; a sort of brotherhood that wouldn’t know either rich or poor or anything else but just the college fellowship. I can see the thing growing and growing, until after a while even the Greek Letters themselves would see the beauty of it and help it along. I....” he stopped suddenly and sat up with a bitter little laugh. “Forget it!” he broke out harshly. “I take spells like that sometimes when I’m not responsible for what I say. Good-night,” and he was gone.

For some little time after Purdick went away, Larry sat with his chin propped in his hands, the good gray eyes staring at the opposite wall and seeing nothing. Once more he was stumbling around in the valley of indecision. What Purdick had said about being loyal to his clan—the work-for-wages clan to which his father and all of his people belonged—had stirred up all the old questionings. Was it true, what Purdick had asserted, that college, or the fraternity and social side of it, would turn a fellow against his own people? Larry couldn’t believe it; and yet....

That was the moment of all moments when he had to remember Monty Brown, Montmorency Haliburton Brown—to give him all of his name. Monty was the son of the Brewster night engine-hostler, and a little money left by a great-aunt for that particular purpose had taken Monty to an Eastern college. Larry had a sudden mental flashlight picture of Monty Brown’s return to the bosom of his family for the long vacation the summer before; a be-tailored, be-barbered thing, smelling of pomatum, contemptuous of his good, honest, workaday family, and holding himself far too dandified to associate with his old school-fellows of the Brewster High. Was it possible that college could do such a thing as that for him—Larry Donovan? He set his teeth hard upon a resolve to turn his back squarely upon every influence that even threatened to lean that way.

Purdick’s little pipe-dream—about the big frat which shouldn’t be like the exclusive Greek Letters—he dismissed at once, though not without seeing what a chance it would offer for some real leader to do a fine thing for the “left-outs.” But he had the good sense to see that this was no job for a green Freshman, however popular he might be. It would need the prestige of an upperclassman—a Junior, at least—and even then it might have a hard row to hoe.

Notwithstanding the fact that his decision was now finally taken, it was a good bit of a trial to convince Dick that it was his job to tell the Zeta Omegas that, for reasons that needn’t be gone into, Freshman Larry Donovan did not wish to be considered as a candidate for fraternal honors. Of course Dick argued, painstakingly, almost pathetically. Being fully committed himself, he could see only one side of the argument, and he was convinced that Larry was throwing away his one best college chance. But Larry stood firm.

“It’s your everlasting ‘workingman’ prejudice, Larry!” Dick flamed out at the last. “You’d rather stand alone than come in with a bunch of fellows who have nothing against them except that, perhaps, some of them won’t have to work with their hands for a living when they get out of college!”

“Call it that if you want to,” said Larry; and he turned to his books with a frown and a sigh. He knew, of old, that it was no use to argue with Dick, and it was costing him something to realize that they had come to a parting of the ways; that the time was at hand when they would no longer be chums in that intimate chumminess which had held unbroken from the time when they had sat across the aisle from each other in the grade school at home.

A few days later the fraternity initiations—postponed that year rather beyond the usual period—began, and Larry saw numbers of his fellow classmen, Dick among them, doing all sorts of absurd and ridiculous “stunts” at all hours of the day and night; saw them and passed by with a grin in which there was a bit more than a tincture of good-natured contempt.

Next came the parting, when Dick packed up his belongings and moved them over to the big frat house opposite the campus portal on the other street. This was a sort of sorry business, as it was naturally bound to be, but of the two, Larry carried off his part of it rather better than Dick did.

“Have you made up your mind yet what you’re going to do?” Dick asked, as he was jamming the last of his things into his trunk and sitting on the lid to make the hasps catch.

“About the room, you mean? Mrs. Grant says I can keep it alone, but I know she can’t afford that.”

“I feel like a yellow dog, dropping out on her this way when it’s too late in the year for her to make other arrangements,” Dick said, getting up to stand on the trunk lid.

“It’s all right with her—that part of it,” Larry offered, “though, of course, she’s sorry to lose you.”

“Not half as sorry as I am to go.”

Larry let out a cheerful bray and called it a laugh.

“Can’t eat your cake and have it too, can you? But I guess you needn’t worry about Mrs. Grant. I expect she’s used to having the frats swipe her star boarders, long before this.”

There was the sputtering chuckle of a motor truck in the street below, a clumping of heavy boots in the hall, and then the voice of Mrs. Grant telling the expressman which room to go to. Dick knelt before his trunk to lock it—which gave him a chance to turn his back upon his room-mate.

“I didn’t mean Mrs. Grant, altogether,” he mumbled; then, twisting about suddenly, with the queerest look on his face that Larry had ever seen there: “You mustn’t drop me, Larry—just because I’m going into the Omegs. I-I don’t believe I could stand for anything like that.”

It was just here, with the expressman tramping along the upper hall and looking for the door to which he had been directed, that the warm Irish Donovan blood came to the fore.

“Don’t you lose a minute’s sleep about that, Dickus!” he burst out, dropping into the use of the old school-boy nickname. “They say that blood’s thicker than water, but there are some other things just about as thick as blood. We’ve knocked around together too long to let a little thing like a frat dig a ditch between us now. When you need me I’ll be right there with both feet. Don’t you forget that.”