Page:Margaret Sherwood--Henry Worthington, idealist.djvu/196

188 "I've been looking at the images off the Parthenon," he said, as he sank into his chair, after bestowing a nod upon his hostess. "This morning I had chapel, Greek, art, history, mathematics; this afternoon, library and museum. You have to keep moving if you are going to take it all in."

Mrs. Appleton conversed most affably with the stranger. Her lips twitched as she saw the look of blank astonishment upon Professor Worthington's face. Mr. Stubbs refused tea. That was for women, he said. At the end of five minutes he unblushingly took out his watch, remarked that he must be going, and disappeared.

"A protégé of mine," observed Mr. Penrose, "from Omaha. He came to hear me lecture, last Wednesday, but left before my remarks were half over. He wanted to visit a class in mineralogy for the rest of the hour. I meet him everywhere. He goes to hear everybody and to see everything. You find him in the library improving, with books, the fifteen-minute period between appointments. You find him at every conceivable lecture taking notes. I'm immensely interested in him. He is a new type, and yet it is a type as old as Shakespeare, the pathetic-comic."

"I presume that he is trying to achieve in one winter all that past generations did not do for him," remarked Mrs. Appleton.

"The boys say he is hustling for culture," said Allan Hayes, shyly.

Professor Worthington was deeply hurt.

"It is the hardest thing a man has to bear," he observed, with something almost like a scowl, "this kind of scholastic dissipation. America, especially Western America, has yet to learn that a little information about many things is much worse than no learning at all. Scholarship here has no worse foe than this tendency to start out in half a dozen lines of work at once, and drop them all."

Alfred Worthington did not know it, but he was talking at Henry. Henry, conversing with his pupil, was trying