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chapter xviii The American as He Is My friend in New York, on whose liberality the financial success of my venture was entirely dependent, had not expected me to get into straits so soon, and it was nearly two weeks before help arrived. In the mean time I had canvassed the labor-market and had found it so discouraging that I informed Esther how unjustified her optimism had been. A lot of people had taken my name and address, but I could tell from the way they looked at me that my chances with them would be very slim even if they had not already got some one else. The soonest I could possibly expect to get employment was at the end of the semester , when a number of the present job-holders would be leaving the university on various missions. I had, also, caught up with my classes, and had succeeded, somehow, in impressing my teachers a little more favorably than my fellow-students. In particular, I was taking effective hold of the work in languages, so much so that my English instructor had twice read my themes to the class without (thank goodness!) divulging my name. My seventeen dollars had gone for books, incidentals , entrance fee, and board; and I was now rapidly and ruinously running into debt, and anxiously inquiring at the post-office for mail. When,at last,relief came in an envelope with yellow stamps,the first thing I did was to buy my permit to the University Dining Club and to secure myself against the future by paying for a month’s keep in advance. The price for board, twenty-one meals, was one dollar and fifty cents; with the cost of the permit it amounted to about two dollars per week. There were between fifty and sixty tables in one vast room, and eight Missourians at each table. When the big gong rang there was a fierce scramble for places, followed by a scraping of chairs and a rattling of crockery and silverware. Usually during the noon meal the manager of the club would get up to make some announcement, and invariably he would be greeted by yells of, “Fire away,” “Jack Horner,” “We want butter,”“Can the oleo.”Before an athletic game, and particularly after a victory, the rooting and the yelling, the pounding on the 143 tables and the miscellaneous racket were deafening. I thought I had wandered into a barbarous country. I confess I did not altogether disapprove of the barbarians. After a while I tried very hard to be one myself. But I did not know how. Most of the conversation at the table and around the campus was about athletics. I wanted to talk about socialism, and found that these university men knew as little about it, and had as dark a dread of it, as the clodpate on the East Side. Religion was taboo. They went to church because it made them feel good, as they put it; and there was an end. They took their Christianity as a sort of drug. Sex, too, was excluded from sane conversation, although there was no objection to it as material for funny stories. I went to one or two football and basket-ball games—I could not afford very many—and liked them. But I could not, for the life of me, say an intelligent word about them. The chatter around me about forward passes and goals and fumbles might just as well have been in a foreign language, for all I got out of it. When Missouri won a hard victory over Texas I caught the enthusiasm and joined in the shirt-tail parade, wondering, in the mean time, what my intellectual friends in New York would have thought if they had seen me in that outfit. But the hero worship bestowed on the overgrown animals who won the battle irritated me. I could not see what place this sort of thing had in a university.And it surprised and delighted me to find that some of the more sensible fellows, who loved the game, took the same view of the matter as I did. I made heroic efforts to become an adept in sports, not so much because the subject interested me, but because I did not greatly relish being taken for a fool. There could be very little doubt but that my tablemates had made up their minds that I was one. No one else that...

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