"You could do that before you came here. You see, it was all right before, when your plans weren't formed. Now it means not only his sliding back, but yours too. You know as well as I do that a half-baked man isn't worth a whoop, not a solitary whoop. You've got to drop down into mediocrity just when you are on the way up to something. And after sacrificing yourself, perhaps, it will have been for nothing. You can't cure that thing in a month, nor a year, nor two years. If he is drinking, regular and hard, you've got to catch him and stay with him just about as long as he lives. You can't leave him after you get him on his feet, or he'll go right back. You know that from experience, don't you?"
"Yes," said Jimmie. The Senior's words came to him as a relief. He had begun the conversation with the feeling that the thing for him to do was to go home, and dreading lest Lyman should think so, too. Now Frank showed him the folly of such a step, and Frank knew about things.
"It means a knockout to your ambition," went on Lyman, "the spoiling of yourself, and you propose to do this for a man you don't care for? I don't understand."
"He is my father," said the Sophomore. This reason had seemed ample, when he was thinking it over alone; it did not sound so convincing now.
"And suppose he is, do you have to pay for that? No, Jimmie, that's a fine sentimental view of it that won't help either of you. Let him wait. You have the right to do it. He can wait two years, till you've had your chance. If it has been going on all this time, two years won't be long, and then when you're through and ready to do something, there'll be sense in it; there isn't now.—"
Just then Freshman Halleck, who had a genius for poking in where he was not wanted, knocked and entered with Encina abruptness, for Frank had not locked the door. He made his stay so long that Lyman, with his thoughts on his unfinished work, said:
"Well, good-night, you fellows," as a gentle hint, and Jimmie withdrew.
The fog had not yet come into the valley when the Sophomore opened the window, down in his own room; it was reaching out, still driven before a lazy wind. Indistinctly the singing of the Glee Club, rolling home from practice in the Quad, came through the damp twilight. Jimmie had been with them on the Christmas trip, tasting a social life he had known nothing of till then. Now they were going to run him for leader next year. He sat on his window ledge listening. The side of the Hall stretched away from him, four tiers of light where the fellows were at work or were bumming away the week-night. Through the opened windows came the low tone of many conversations, stirred now and then by a "rough-house" note. A coyote barked somewhere among the hills, a reminder of the nearness of our higher life to the life universal. Jimmie took a long, deep breath of the moist air, as though he would draw it all, all unto himself. This was his life, he had made it for himself, and he loved it, he loved it! He had no part any longer with what had come before it. All these were in shadow, the people and things of his bitter childhood. The fellows up there in the lighted rooms had homes somewhere; there was a feed-box being opened even then, perhaps, at some study table; they were thinking of vacation, most of them, and of other places. But this was home to Mason, this wide, soft campus, with the sandstone arching over it and bounded by shaggy hills, the only place he could call his own. Most of the laughing people who lived here with him were in a dream from which some Commencement Day would wake them. To Mason it was reality. Yes, Frank Lyman was right. Jimmie was glad he had asked him. The idea of going away had been a thoughtless impulse, an immature judgment. He would stay—for the two years.
He took off his coat and opened a book under the lamp; but a face came and settled between him and the page, a bloated face with irresolute lips that would not move from the black and white before him, but flickered there and mocked him, until finally he closed the book, and, without looking out again on the campus, turned into bed.