“I can’t see that that cuts any particular ice, if he is going to be ruined before it passes,” John objected.
“But he won’t be,” put in Haydock, confidently.
“What can possibly save him?” John was terribly in earnest. “His best friends are loafers and snobs; they never learn anything, and they all drink too much. All they want is a good time,—the wrong kind of a good time. Who is going to make him take a brace? I’ve tried, and I can’t; the college doesn’t seem to give a—”
“Hold on—hold on—hold on,” broke in Haydock; “give the college a show. What do you expect the college to do anyhow? Supply wet-nurses for all the silly little boys who make themselves sick on cocktails at the Adams House?”
“It could do something.”
“Yes, and doesn’t it,—the very finest thing in the world! Doesn’t it allow all sorts of men to come here, and give them the chance of their lives to learn about everybody and everything that was ever good or great or worth learning about? Isn’t it willing to share the very best of what it has,—and it has everything,—its traditions and its knowledge and its beauty? Doesn’t it want to make the fellows here part of it all, if they only have the guts to keep their heads up, and follow along the road it has built for them? Is there any place else where you can live for four years—the four important ones—and know that the standard of everything held up to you can’t change, like the trivial little standards of other places, that the aim won’t swerve, no matter what happens, and that they are the highest, the best? Isn’t that doing something—everything?”
Haydock was occasionally enthusiastic in a calm, thoughtful sort of way.
“I know what you mean—I’ve thought about it myself; but Billy is going to hell. What about Billy?” John insisted.
“Oh, as for that—to pass from the sublime to Billy—he simply won’t; that is to say, he won’t here, at Harvard.”
There was a gleam of hope in John’s eyes.