Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/124

 It's no hardship for me. It's a real pleasure for us to be able to help you to an education.…"

Neale chewed his pen hard. How hard it was to have things out with a father! When a man takes it for granted that if you don't want to go to college you must want to be a bank-clerk or sell shoes, how are you to make him understand anything about Freedom and the Open Road and Comradeship and Vagabondia, distant countries and ships that smell of tar and salt like the wharves. How could a man in a three-button, pepper-and-salt cut-away understand? A man who wore a derby hat and went to his office in the city every day? And Father was getting fat, too, the three-button cut-away was heavily rounded. No—all that was in another world. There weren't any words to express any of it to a Father. So he said nothing, jabbing his pen into the blotting paper. Presently Father went on, "Of course, I should like to have you go to my old college, Williams, but Mother feels—we both feel—that it would be a pity to break up the family circle. What would you think of Columbia? They say since it has moved up to Morningside Heights there is more college life—and of course it's one of the leading Universities.…"

Another pause, so long that Neale felt bound to say something.

"Oh, I guess I would like Columbia as well as any," he finally brought out.

Father looked at him several minutes. Then he stood up, "We needn't settle it to-night, of course. Think it over; we'll talk it over again."

But of course they never did. They never talked anything over. The subject was not raised again. Nevertheless it was somehow understood in the family that Neale was going to enter Columbia. And Neale made no protest. To tell the truth, as spring advanced and all his classmates began talking over their plans for next year, the uniformity of having a recognized respectable destination was not disagreeable. It saved talk, and useless talk about his affairs was one of the things Neale detested. Till he could be really independent and