Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/84

 him, and thought and planned for him, and goaded him on to his lessons with little avail. He was eighteen years of age and was scarcely ready for high school. She told me all these distressing details with much feeling as he sat by stolidly listening. He seemed to me a bright enough boy who was not listening to the tale of his intellectual shortcomings for the first time.

"What's the matter with Bob?" she asked in real distress. "Why doesn't he do better?"

"Too much mother, I believe," I answered frankly. For the first time during the conversation Bob looked at me and smiled and winked a knowing eye.

"You have been working out his problems for him during all these years," I continued, "let him do it for himself, now. Leave him here, and don't see him for six months."

"I have never been away from him a week in his life," she said. "He doesn't know how to take care of his clothes, or to look after himself. It would kill me to stay away from him that long."

"It will ruin him if you don't," I said. She was after all wanting very much to do the best for her boy. She left him, hard as it was, and for the first time in his life Bob was thrown upon his own responsibility. I need not go into detail. He liked the new régime, he did his work, and had his first experience in passing his examinations on his own initiative.

The picture is, of course, not always so black a one. Three of the undergraduates of my acquaintance this year who made the most conspicuous success in college, both from the standpoint of the faculty