Page:The Professor's House - Willa Cather.pdf/178

 scientific work would be comparatively easy. But that was not all the story; his was a many-sided mind, though a simple and straightforward personality.

Of course Mrs. St. Peter had insisted that he was not altogether straightforward; but that was merely because he was not altogether consistent. As an investigator he was clear-sighted and hard-headed; but in personal relations he was apt to be exaggerated and quixotic. He idealized the people he loved and paid his devoir to the ideal rather than to the individual, so that his behaviour was sometimes a little too exalted for the circumstances—“chivalry of the cinema,” Lillian used to say. One of his sentimental superstitions was that he must never on any account owe any material advantage to his friends, that he must keep affection and advancement far apart, as if they were chemicals that would disintegrate each other. St. Peter thought this the logical result of Tom’s strange bringing-up and his early associations. There is, he knew, this dream of self-sacrificing friendship and disinterested love down among the day-labourers, the men who run the railroad trains and boats and reapers and thrashers and mine-drills of the world. And Tom had brought it along to the university, where advancement through personal influence was considered honourable.

It was not until Outland was a senior that Lil-