Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/196

 to finish his work. He had previously been a confirmed loafer who had by strategy and luck barely escaped dismissal.

"I'm sorry you have come back, Baker," I said to him. "I've expended about as much physical and mental energy on you as I think you are entitled to. I should not care to give you a permit to reënter unless I can have some assurance that you are coming back with a definite purpose to do your work faithfully and well." He gave me the assurance, but there was no real enthusiasm in what he did. He cut class and fooled away his time trying, of course, to keep safely within the limit that would bring him passing grades, but he was the same old loafer as before.

"I am hurting no one but myself," is the favorite excuse of every young fellow who by irregular habits is injuring his mind or his body, but the loafer can truthfully make no such assertion. No young fellow loafs long alone; he spends little of his time reading even trashy or vicious books; he is not given to solitude or meditation. He must gather friends about him and they go out together. There never was a loafer in college who did not ruin some one else in order that he might have a pal to accompany him on his daily orgies of pool and billiards and poker, and soft drinks and fussing and vaudeville and the movies and local gossip, or whatever it is with which he whiles away his hours.

"You don't need to be afraid of my leading any one astray," a young fellow not in college said to me when asking my permission to live in one of the fraternity houses.