"Yes, Tom; all the same—what?"
"If you'd be willing to take what I can offer you—"
"Take what you can offer me! You're not offering me anything."
He explained his ambitions, for her as well as for himself. Life was big; it was full of opportunity; his origin didn't chain any man who knew how to burst its bonds. He did know. He didn't know how he knew, but he did. He just had it in him. When you knew you had it in you, you didn't depend on anyone to tell you; you yourself became your own corroboration.
But in order to fulfil this conviction of inner power you needed to know things. You needed the experience, the standing, the rubbing up against other men, which you got in college in a way that you didn't get anywhere else. You got some of it by going into business, but only some of it. In any case, it was no more than a chance in business. You might get it or you might not. With the best will in the world on your part, it might slip by you. In college it couldn't slip by you, if you had any intelligence at all. All the past experience of mankind was gathered up there for you to profit by. You could only absorb a little of it, of course. But you acquired the habit of absorbing. It was not so much what you learned that gave college its value; it was the learning of a habit of learning. You got an attitude of mind. Your attitude of mind was what made you, what determined your place in the world. With a closed mind you got nowhere; with an open mind the world was as the sea driving all its fish into your net. College opened the mind; it was the easiest method by which it could be done. If she would only be patient till he had got through the preliminary training and had found the job for which he would be fitted....
"But what's the use of waiting when you can get a job for which you'd be fitted right off the bat? There's a family up here on the hill that wants a shofer. They give a hundred and twenty-five a month. Why go to all that trouble about opening your mind when here's the job handed out to you? The gentleman-friend I told you about says that business has got college skinned. He says colleges are punk. He says lots of men in business won't take a man if he's been to college. They'd want a fellow with some get-up-and-get to him."
He began to understand her as he had never done before. Maisie had the closed mind. She was Honey's "orthodock," the type which accepts the limitations other people fix for it. He registered the thought, long forming in his mind subconsciously, that among American types the orthodock is the commonest. It was not true, as so often assumed, that the average American is keen to forge ahead and become something bigger than he is. That was one of the many self-flattering American ideals that had no relation to life. Mrs. Ansley's equality of opportunity was another. People passed these phrases on, and took for granted they were true, when in everyday practice they were false.
There could be no breaking forth into a larger life so long as the national spirit made for repression, suppression, restriction, and denial. Maisie was but one of the hundred and sixteen millions of Americans out of a possible hundred and seventeen on whom all the pressure of social, industrial, educational, and religious life had been brought to bear to keep her mind shut, her tastes puerile, and her impulses to expansion thwarted. With a great show of helping and blessing the less fortunate, American life, he was coming to believe, was organized to force them back, and beat them into subjection. The hundred and seventeenth million loved to believe that it wasn't so; it was not according to their consciences that it should be so; but the result could be seen in the hundred and sixteen million minds drilled to disability, as Maisie's was.
A young man not yet hardened to life's injustices, he saw himself rushing to Maisie's aid, to make the best of her. Experience would help her as it had helped him. The shriveled bud of her mind would unfold in warmth and sunshine. This would be in their future together. In the meantime he must clear the ground of the present by getting rid of pretence.