Again, he told her how he had been sent to college--she was always leading him to talk of himself, and her imagination more than supplied that which his unaffected modesty, sometimes deliberately, more often unconsciously, kept out of his stories.
Ever since he could remember, his strongest passion had been for books, for reading.Before he was born the wilderness was subdued and the cruel toil of his parents' early life was mitigated by the growth of towns, the spread of civilization.
There was a chance for some leisure, for the higher gratification of the intense American passion for education.A small library had sprung up in one corner of the general room of the old farm-house--from the seeds of a Bible, an almanac, Milton's Paradise Lost, Baxter's Saint's Rest and a Government report on cattle.But the art collection had stood still for years--a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, another of the Emancipation Proclamation, pictures of Washington, Lincoln and Napoleon, the last held in that household second only to Washington in all history as a "leveler."The only daughter, Arabella, had been sent to boarding-school in Cincinnati.She married a rich man, lived in the city and, under the inspiration of English novels and the tutelage of a woman friend who visited in New York and often went abroad, was developing ideas of family and class and rank.She talked feelingly of the "lower classes" and of the duty of the "upper class" toward them.Her "goings-on" created an acid prejudice against higher education in her father's mind.As she was unfolding to him a plan for sending Hampden to Harvard he interrupted with, "No MORE idiots in my family at my expense,"and started out to feed the pigs.The best terms Hampden's mother could make were that he should not be disinherited and cast off if he went to Battle Field and paid his own way.
He did not tell Pauline all of this, nor did he repeat to her the conversation between himself and his father a few days before he left home.
"Is 'Bella going to pay your way through?" asked his father, looking at him severely--but he looked severely at every one except Hampden's gentle-voiced mother.
"No, sir." The son's voice was clear.
"Is your mother?"
"No, sir."
"Have you got money put by?"
"Four hundred dollars."
"Is that enough?"
"It'll give me time for a long look around."The old man drew a big, rusty pocketbook from the inside pocket of the old-fashioned, flowered-velvet waistcoat he wore even when he fed the pigs.He counted out upon his knee ten one-hundred-dollar bills.He held them toward his son.
"That'll have to do you," he said."That's all you'll get.""No, thank you," replied Hampden."I wish no favors from anybody.""You've earned it over and above your keep," retorted his father."It belongs to you.""If I need it I'll send for it," said Hampden, that being the easiest way quickly to end the matter.
But he did tell Pauline that he purposed to pay his own way through college.
"My father has a notion," said he, "that the things one works for and earns are the only things worth having.And I think one can't begin to act on that notion too early.If one is trying to get an education, why not an all-round education, instead of only lessons out of books?"From that moment Pauline ceased to regard dress or any other external feature as a factor in her estimate of Hampden Scarborough.
"But your plan might make a man too late in getting a start--some men, at least," she suggested.
"A start--for what?" he asked.
"For fame or fortune or success of any kind."Scarborough's eyes, fixed on the distance, had a curious look in them--he was again exactly like that first view she had had of him.
"But suppose one isn't after any of those things," he said.
"Suppose he thinks of life as simply an opportunity for self-development.He starts at it when he's born, and the more of it he does the more he has to do.And--he can't possibly fail, and every moment is a triumph--and----" He came back from his excursion and smiled apologetically at her.
But she was evidently interested.
"Don't you think a man ought to have ambition?" she asked.She was thinking of her lover and his audacious schemes for making himself powerful.
"Oh--a man is what he is.Ambition means so many different things.""But shouldn't you like to be rich and famous and--all that?""It depends----" Scarborough felt that if he said what was in his mind it might sound like cant.So he changed the subject.
"Just now my ambition is to get off that zoology condition."
