Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/94

 sympathy for this beginner in life with all the problems of his world thick about him. Don saw his father, merely, as a lawyer whose practice in the courts had dulled his sense of truth and justice and the ideals behind the statutes and had left him only the lesson of conformity which is so often the essence of the law to the priest and the practitioner.

It gave the boy new cause to hate the profession. His mind, at college, had turned from the thought of it with distaste, and rose against it—now that it was to be forced on him—with an almost desperate repulsion. His aunt's allowance, added to the money which he had saved from his small expenses at college, would put him through whatever "course" he chose to take. He would not quarrel with his father, but he would not submit to him.

He entered the "study" with a volume which he pretended he had come to return to its shelf. He found his father walking up and down the room, smoking a curved pipe. A gas lamp, with a frosted shade, lit a precise arrangement of books and papers on the table. Don walked past them almost defiantly, and turned his back from the bookcase.

Mr. Gregg said abruptly: "I judge from your college 'Calendar' that your Political Science course does not really begin until your second year. Is that correct?"

Don answered, without turning: "Yes, sir."

Mr. Gregg cleared his throat. 'You have until then to make up your mind what you are going to do."

Don waited, shutting the glass doors of the