Phipps-Herrick grunted.

"Certainly I took it. It was supposed to be a soft-snap course.
What do you think we go to Harvard for? But that little beast,
Professor von Buch, gave me a cold forty-minus on examination. So
I dropped it, and thank God I've forgotten the little I ever knew
of German! It will be absolutely useless in the new world."

"Right you are," said Rosenlaube. "My grandfather used to speak
it when he was angry--a sloppy, slushy language, extremely ugly.
At Princeton, you know, we stand by the classics, Latin and Greek,
the real thing in languages. You ought to hear Dean Andy West talk
about that. Of course a fellow forgets his Virgil and his Homer when
he gets out in the world. But, then, he's had the benefit of them;
they've given him real culture and literature. There's nothing
outside of the classics, except perhaps a few things in French
and Italian. Thank God I never studied German!"

The third man, who had kept silence up to this point, now gently
butted in. It was little Phil Mitchell, of Overbrook, a University
of Pennsylvania man, who had been stopped in his junior year by
a financial catastrophe in the family, and had gone out to Idaho
to earn his living as third assistant bookkeeper in a big mining
concern. He took a few real books with him, besides those that
he was to "keep." Double entry was his business; reading, his
recreation; thinking, his vocation. From all this the great war
called him as with a trumpet.

"Look here, you fellows," he said quietly, "in spite of this war
and all the rest of it, there are some good things in German."