made clearings in the wilderness and forced crops from the very stones. Shiny at the elbows, clumsy in the feet, they had as little wish to cultivate the social graces as he had himself; and, like him, they came from their boarding-house garrets to their morning lectures, and went from the class-rooms to the library and from the library back to the class-rooms diligently all day, and returned at last, blinking through the twilight and loaded down with books, to swallow a hasty supper and begin a long evening's work bent double over the discarded "parlour" tables that stood beside their boarding-house beds.
Conroy, of course. Joined the ranks of the more leisured students who had time for athletics, college clubs and fraternal societies. He became what was called, in the student slang, "a sport"; whereas Don was already marked as one of the "plugs." The sports had a sharp contempt for these latter—round-shouldered and bilious word-grubbers who worked like convicts and gave the University the atmosphere of a penal institution—and Conroy began to be ashamed of his cousin when they met on the lawns. "You're getting to be an awful fish," he remonstrated, one night in their room. "A man doesn't come to college just for the books. You ought to do something to keep up the—the college spirit."
He, himself, had learned to smoke a "bulldog" briar; he wore a class pin conspicuously on the lapel of his coat; he had an inch of college ribbon sewed in the band of his hat; he had caught the tone of almost brutal frankness which his new companions
