Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/188

 student" and to take a certain pride in the fact that this characteristic in some way differentiates him from the common herd of undergraduates who do their work because they like it, or who go at things with energy because it is their duty. He takes his commonplace work as a matter of course, just as many people assume without trying that they can not learn to spell.

"You had a shamefully low average last semester," I remarked to Brinkerhoff the other day, "for a man of your training and ability."

"Well, I'm no student," was his self-satisfied reply, which was only another way of saying, "I'm a hopeless loafer, and you ought to be satisfied that I got through as well as I did." There was no shame on his part, no resolve to do better, simply a resignation to the inevitable.

The loafer in college is not always a boy who has been brought up in luxury; he not infrequently comes from very humble surroundings; but wherever he has been brought up he has never developed any love for work. When he enters college it is without ambition, without any definite purpose or object; he has little idea of what he wants to do, no love of books, no interest in study, no vision of the future. He does not know whether he wants to go north or south, whether he would like to study art or ceramic engineering, whether he would prefer to spend his life as a missionary or as a vaudeville star. Some of the other fellows were coming to college, so he threw a few changes of clothing into a suitcase and came along, just as he might have joined a camping party or taken a hike into the country. Some of the most