Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/165

 cieties in New Haven; and it was their Harvard friends, they boasted, who finally put Oliver into the "Pud."

They never gave Oliver credit himself for catching on at last, though he actually had a part in a Hasty Pudding Play and got on the staff of the Lampoon. He was graduated "summa cum laude" and with Phi Beta Kappa, too; so he was offered a fellowship to return to the University next year as graduate instructor. The pay, of course, was ridiculous; but Oliver was independent of salary and delighted that he was wanted for himself. So he returned and instructed, and he dreamt happily of the day when he would work up to head of his Department and he would present to the university a new lecture hall, named after his old professor, and Oliver Cullen would hold classes in the big theater in which two or three hundred boys would gather, calling him affectionate nicknames among themselves and clapping when he came into the room.

His father despairingly attempted to turn Oliver from such ambitions; but his uncle Lucas laughed. Life insurance companies were beginning to ask reëxamination of John's "risk"; and Lucas's sons were out of college and demanding quite a place in the business. If Oliver liked to live like a highbrow on a few thousand a year, let him; he probably would never marry, and if he did, it would be to some Beacon Hill dowd who would keep him anchored in Boston far from interference with the Cullen western offices.

So everything was steering directly toward Lucas when Agnes Dehan put in her oar. Before she married Oliver, she made certain stipulations not communicated to others but which soon appeared in effect. The first evidently was that Oliver take her to Eng-