most?"

"Oh, I guess it'll do as well as another."

"But damn it all, why not have a look? We can have a big look now, we've
got a chance to broaden out before we jump into our little jobs--to see
all the jobs and size 'em up and look at 'em as a part of the world!"

"Oh, biff." I got little or no response. The greater part of these
decent likable fellows could not warm up to anything big, they simply
hadn't it in them.

"Why in hell do you want me to get all hot?" drawled one fat sluggard of
a friend. "I'll keep alive when the time comes." And he and his kind set
the standard for all. Sometimes a chap who could warm up, who had the
real stuff in him, would "loosen up" about his life on some long tramp
with me alone. But back in college his lips were sealed. It was not
exactly that he was ashamed, it was simply that with his college friends
such talk seemed utterly out of place.

"Look out, Bill," said one affectionately. "You'll queer yourself if you
keep on."

The same held true of religion. An upper classman, if he felt he had to,
might safely become a leader of freshmen in the Y. M. C. A. But when one
Sunday evening I disturbed a peaceful pipe-smoking crowd by wondering
why it was that we were all so bored in chapel, there fell an
embarrassing silence--until someone growled good-humoredly, "Don't bite
off more'n you can chew." Nobody wanted to drop his religion, he simply
wanted to let it alone. I remember one Sunday in chapel, in the midst of
a long sermon, how our sarcastic old president woke us up with a start.

"I was asked," he said, "if we had any free thinkers here. 'No,' I
replied. 'We have not yet advanced that far. For it takes half as much
thinking to be a free thinker as it does to believe in God.'"

And I remember the night in our sophomore club when the news came like a
thunderclap that one of our members had been killed pole-vaulting at a
track meet in New York. It was our habit, in our new-found manliness, to
eat with our hats on, shout and sing, and speak of our food as
"tapeworm," "hemorrhage," and the like. I remember how we sat that
night, silent, not a word from the crowd--one starting to eat, then
seeing it wasn't the thing to do, and staring blankly like the rest.
They were terrible, those stares into reality. That clutching pain of
grief was real, so real it blotted everything out. Later some of us in
my room began to talk in low voices of what a good fellow he had been.
Then some ch