Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/224

 Then came Thanksgiving Day, the climax … and oh, after that, what a vacuum! Nothing in life but classes! Holy smoke! It was fierce! What did the fellows do who hadn't had anything but classes! How could they stand it? But of course, it wasn't such a come-down for them.

Going home as Neale did every afternoon, he had none of the scanty, ill-organized college social life. Sliding into college as he had, with no introduction from the right kind of Prep, school, and with a noticeably colorless personality, he was not thought of as a possibility for any fraternity. Time hung heavy on his hands. Lectures took up but three hours a day, on the busiest days. To fill in the rest of the time there was the swimming pool, the Gymnasium and the Library. He swam, practised the overhand racing stroke, dived; in the Gym. he fooled awkwardly on the parallel bars and side-horse; he tossed medicine balls with any pick-up acquaintance; what he really enjoyed was the line of traveling rings which hung in front of the visitors' gallery—but one day he heard an upper classman refer to these as "Freshmen's Delight," and thereafter he avoided them.

The Library, the first one to which he had had access, wasn't so bad. Neale went there first to look up a reference for Comp. Lit. A. Of course you ran the risk of being thought a grind if you spent too much time there, but you could kill the hours very pleasantly with the bound volumes of the magazines in the shelves about the general reading-room. Neale and most of his friends wasted an unconscionable number of hours on those magazines: but little by little the library habit began to form itself, by slow, infinitesimal accretions. He found it a good place to study, wrote English A. themes there, finally even got into the way of running through the card catalogue, and drawing books with titles that sounded good.

Christmas came. Father, recognizing manhood achieved, gave him a box of a hundred Milo cigarettes. Mother—poor, dear, ignorant Mother!—gave him a white sweater decorated with a light blue C! Even more than by smoking Father's cigarettes, Neale proved that he had begun to outgrow the