He stretched himself up, and reached for a cap. "Pell and I were just about to prowl down to Heublein's."
As they crossed Chapel Street, the rubber-lunged news-boys were shouting, "All about the big strike! Street car men to quit to-morrow!"
Pelham purchased a smudgy sheet. While the waiter was double-quicking their orders, all eyes were directed at the leading story.
"Look at this," Ralph Jervis, one of the classmates, pointed insistently, "the president of the road says he'll break the strike with college men. Let's take a week off, and be blooming motormen!"
A spectacled Senior dissented at once. "It wouldn't be the thing, fellows. Those strikers may be in the right, for all we know."
Jervis howled his disgust. "That's what comes of joining the Socialist Study Club! Falkhaven's a regular anarchist. Why, it's a great idea! Are you on, Neil?"
"Sure!" The Texan roused himself to answer briskly. "If Pell'll come too."
The constant deference and affection displayed toward his big-hearted roommate hurt him, against his will. For all his ability in studies and on the mat, Pelham was not popular. He had never been accepted in the higher circles of Sheff life, the Colony and Cloister groups; and he in turn held himself aloof from the run of the class.
He was a thorough-going snob, for all his talk of democracy. Anywhere in the South, which held the finest people in the country, a Judson would be known and recognized, and given his proper place. These Yankees, no matter how nice they might be personally, were Republicans; in the South, only negroes and turncoats belonged to that party. At meetings of the Southern Club, he had seconded the resolution asking that negro students be provided with a separate gymnasium and eating hall. It had furnished a week's laugh to the University; hot-headedly, he resented this. He felt that the leading men held him merely on tolerance; he shrank in upon himself.
This feeling of isolation was not entirely unwelcome. He had become used to it in his mountain days. Here it had driven him to the College Library, where he had mastered all its bulky volumes on mining and kindred phases of engineering. He branched from these into higher mathematics, until he could stump his instructor on the fourth dimension. The previous Christmas holiday, he had turned to modern European drama, and had covered what he could find in an amazing short time; although it was not easy to stomach such plays as "The Weavers," and some of Shaw's dramatic maunderings.