Page:The Sunday Eight O'Clock (1916).pdf/41

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Profanity

I RAN into Brown the other night about eight o'clock as I was com ing down Green Street. He was with two or three companions, well known men about the campus. It was a commonplace discussion that they were carrying on, but he was swearing profanely and loudly, mixing his oaths with vulgar gutter talk. I was not shocked, for as a boy I had been thrown with all conditions of the underworld—coal heavers and river rats, and ignorant section gangs, and I had heard the talk of the riff raff that follows a threshing outfit in the northwest—but I was surprised.

You must not class Brown as the ordinary loud-mouthed underclassman. He is a senior who has an educated, religious father and a refined, gentle mother. At home Brown is himself an active member of the leading