Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/50

 But the excuses already given explain only a small percentage of the cases where notes are not met at the time of maturity. Far and away the largest number of graduates who fail to meet their notes when they become due give matrimony as the only excuse. Whether the self-supporting student who must borrow while he is in college is after he graduates less experienced in the affairs of the heart or more sentimental than the average, it is a fact that he is the first to gather his family gods under his own roof-tree, and, ignoring or forgetting his former obligations, to take to himself a wife. It has become quite a habit with me now, when a former student does not pay his loan when it becomes due, to suppose that he has married, or knowing that he has married and that his regular monthly payments have ceased, to surmise that his family has increased in size, and my supposition is nearly always correct.

A few years ago I found in the morning mail an appealing letter from a former undergraduate. He had been out of work for some time until all his funds had gone. Now, however, he had found a good job. His only trouble was that he did not have at hand, nor could he get, sufficient money to meet the most simple living expenses until he should obtain his first month's pay. Would I not, remembering our former friendship, let him have twenty-five dollars until pay day, and thus virtually save his life? I sent him a check for the amount asked for, but did not hear from him for months. I wrote him two or three times, but even my letters brought me no response. Then one day when I was in the city I called