Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/169

 This government kindergarten business makes me tired. What's the use of hanging around here for four years? You don't learn anything that'll ever be any good to you. We'll have to strike out for ourselves sometime, and we might as well face it now as any other day!"

Don looked from one to the other, silenced.

"You'll never learn to swim until you go into the water," Pittsey put in airily. He reached a text-book that was lying on Don's table, and began to turn over the leaves. Conroy smoked feverishly. It was evident to Don that their minds were made up. He looked at them almost with envy. They were going to do what he would, too—if he dared.

Then Pittsey, tossing the book back on the table with a gesture of decision, said: "Expelled? We'll expel them! The pompous flat-heads with their machine-made college education, we'll expel them out of our lives. Eh, Mac?" And without bitterness, as if the whole affair were a lark to him, alert and self-assured, he began to make fun of the college, the professors, the lectures, the students, the country—everything that they were leaving; and Conroy listened, fascinated, smiling when Pittsey smiled and agreeing with everything in resolute nods, his teeth bitten into his pipe. "What's the use of staying here?" Pittsey demanded, his close-set black eyes sparkling on Don's gloomy abstraction. "Everything's scaled to the wage of a dollar a day. They keep their savings in an old sock. A fellow never gets an increase in salary until he gets married; and then they raise him every time his wife has a baby. As