Page:So Big (1924).djvu/239

 clothes, boys. They cut classes whenever possible. The Student Body. Midwest turned them out by the hundreds—almost by the link, one might say, as Aug Hempel’s sausage factory turned out its fine plump sausages, each one exactly like the one behind and the one ahead of it. So many hundreds graduated in this year’s class. So many more hundreds to be graduated in next year’s class. Occasionally an unruly sausage burst its skin and was discarded. They attended a university because their parents—thrifty shop-keepers, manufacturers, merchants, or professional men and their good wives—wanted their children to have an education. Were ambitious for them. “I couldn’t have it myself, and always regretted it. Now I want my boy (or girl) to have a good education that'll fit ’em for the battle of life. This is an age of specialization, let me tell you.”

Football, fudge, I-said-to-Jim, I-said-to-Bessie.

The Unclassifieds would no more have deliberately cut a class than they would have thrown their sparse weekly budget-allowance into the gutter. If it had been physically possible they would have attended two classes at once, listened to two lectures, prepared two papers simultaneously. Drab and earnest women between thirty and forty-eight, their hair not an ornament, but something to be pinned up quickly out of the way, their clothes a covering, their shoes not even smartly “sensible,” but just shoes, scuffed, patched, utilitarian. The men were serious, shabby, often spectacled; dandruff on their coat collars; their lined,