it down in cold blood and READ
'em--These teachers--how do they get that way?"

Mrs. Babbitt, darning socks, speculated, "Yes, I wonder why. Of course I
don't want to fly in the face of the professors and everybody, but I do
think there's things in Shakespeare--not that I read him much, but when
I was young the girls used to show me passages that weren't, really,
they weren't at all nice."

Babbitt looked up irritably from the comic strips in the Evening
Advocate. They composed his favorite literature and art, these
illustrated chronicles in which Mr. Mutt hit Mr. Jeff with a rotten egg,
and Mother corrected Father's vulgarisms by means of a rolling-pin. With
the solemn face of a devotee, breathing heavily through his open
mouth, he plodded nightly through every picture, and during the rite
he detested interruptions. Furthermore, he felt that on the subject of
Shakespeare he wasn't really an authority. Neither the Advocate-Times,
the Evening Advocate, nor the Bulletin of the Zenith Chamber of Commerce
had ever had an editorial on the matter, and until one of them had
spoken he found it hard to form an original opinion. But even at risk
of floundering in strange bogs, he could not keep out of an open
controversy.

"I'll tell you why you have to study Shakespeare and those. It's because
they're required for college entrance, and that's all there is to it!
Personally, I don't see myself why they stuck 'em into an up-to-date
high-school system like we have in this state. Be a good deal better if
you took Business English, and learned how to write an ad, or letters
that would pull. But there it is, and there's no tall, argument, or
discussion about it! Trouble with you, Ted, is you always want to do
something different! If you're going to law-school--and you are!--I
never had a chance to, but I'll see that you do--why, you'll want to lay
in all the English and Latin you can get."

"Oh punk. I don't see what's the use of law-school--or even finishing
high school. I don't want to go to college 'specially. Honest, there's
lot of fellows that have graduated from colleges that don't begin
to make as much money as fellows that went to work early. Old Shimmy
Peters, that teaches Latin in the High, he's a what-is-it from Columbia
and he sits up all night reading a lot of greasy books and he's always
spieling about the 'value of languages,' and the poor soak doesn't make
but eighteen hundred a year, and no traveling salesman woul