Page:The High School Boy and His Problems (1920).pdf/186

 resting place between youth and manhood where one forms associations only, or absorbs a few facts or a little culture. They do not for a moment consider it a place where a young fellow should get down to business and work hard, but rather a place of leisure, or recreation, a place to dream and smoke, and sleep late in the morning, and talk nonsense to pretty girls while one is waiting for the real work of life to begin. It is this sort of man who yawns or turns up his nose when the subject of scholarship is introduced. He doesn't want to get high grades, not he. He is going to have to go to work quite soon enough, he declares, so why spoil the best years of one's life by digging.

Peters was that sort. He could prove by statistics gathered from all kinds of, to him at least, reliable sources that the commonplace man in his studies in college always develops later into a captain of finance or a world leader. He spent most of his time cultivating an effective shot at billiards or sitting in front of the fire smoking cigarettes and outlining to the other fellows who would listen to him the business and social conquests he expected to make when his college career should close. Unfortunately it closed somewhat sooner than he anticipated, for the faculty took another view of things than that held by Peters, and dropped him at the end of his sophomore year for poor scholarship. Peters is only one of the many illustrations I have known of the fact that there isn't much place in college for the loafer, or for the man who is trying only to pick up a little social experience or to acquire a little