Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/191

 He either smokes because he puts in so much time loafing that he needs some recreation to keep him from getting lonesome, or he loafs because he has smoked so much that it has robbed him of the energy sufficient to do anything else. The odor of the Fatimas which he has burned up floats across the desk to me as he comes in to ask me for an excuse because of illness; before he steps off the campus he has lighted another to stimulate his waning interest in life, and wherever you meet him,—between dances, at his room, on the street,—he is drawing strength and comfort from a pipe or a cigarette. It is the badge of his fraternity.

"Why do you smoke so much?" I asked Rheims, whose restless manner and putty colored complexion and yellow finger nails told the story of his devotion to Nicotine. "You know it hurts you."

"Yes, I suppose it does; but why do you want to rob a man of all pleasure?" That was too much for me.

It is hard for the loafer to study; there are so many easier, subtler, cleverer ways to get by. He means to do it—to-morrow, Sunday, next week, before the end of the semester,—but he is such an awfully popular fellow, he has so many friends to entertain, so many dates to keep, so many extra-curriculum duties to perform, that he has little or no time to give to study. He borrows your notes which he has been too lazy or too busy to take himself, and never returns them until you go to his room and hunt him up; he questions you about your outside reading and tries to get the gist of its content so that he may be spared the labor of doing it for himself, he sits by you dur-