"I will tell you something," spoke Thor, at last, with an air of impatient resignation, "and don't bother me again, please! I have come to Bannister College to get an education, and I have the right to do so, without being pestered. I pay my bills, and I am entitled to all the knowledge I can purchase. I look from my window, and I see boys, whose fathers are toiling, sacrificing, to send them here. Instead of studying, to show their gratitude, they loaf around the campus, or in their rooms, twanging banjos and guitars, singing silly songs, and sky-larking. I don't know what all this rot is you are talking of; 'college spirit,' 'my Alma Mater,' and so on. I do not want to play football; I do not like the game; I need the time for my study, so I will not play. Both my father and myself have labored and sacrificed to send me to college. The past five years, with one great ambition to go to college and learn, I have toiled like a galley-slave.
"And now, when opportunity is mine, do you ask me to _play_? You want me to loaf around, wasting precious time better spent in my studies. What do I care whether the boys like me, or hate me? Bah! I can take any two of you, and knock your heads together! Their friendship or enmity won't move me. I shall study, learn. I will not waste time in senseless foolishness, and I _won't_ play football again."
T. Haviland Hicks, Jr. was silent as he stood by the window of his room, gazing down at the campus where the collegians were gathering before marching to the Auditorium for the nightly mass-meeting that would vainly strive to arouse a fighting spirit in the football "rooters." That blithesome, heedless, happy-go-lucky youth was capable of far more serious thought than old Bannister knew; and more, he possessed the rare ability to read character; in the case of Thor, he saw vastly deeper than his indignant comrades, who beheld only the surface of the affair. They knew only that John Thorwald, a veritable Colossus, had exhibited football prowess that practically promised the State Championship to old Bannister, and then--he had quit the game. They understood only that Thor refused to play simply because he did not want to, and as to why their appeals to his college spirit and his love for his Alma Mater were unheeded they were puzzled.
