"Your turn?" she inquired.
"Yes—I'm the great-grandson—the only one. It's always a great-grandson."
"You DO look dangerous," said Pauline, and the smile and the glance she sent with the words might have been misunderstood by a young man entertaining the ideas which were then filling that young man's brain.
Again, he told her how he had been sent to college—she was always leading him to talk of himself, and her imagination more than supplied that which his unaffected modesty, sometimes deliberately, more often unconsciously, kept out of his stories.
Ever since he could remember, his strongest passion had been for books, for reading. Before he was born the wilderness was subdued and the cruel toil of his parents' early life was mitigated by the growth of towns, the spread of civilization. There was a chance for some leisure, for the higher gratification of the intense American passion for education. A small library had sprung up in one corner of the general room of the old farm-house—from the seeds of a Bible, an almanac, Milton's Paradise Lost, Baxter's Saint's Rest and a Government report on cattle. But the art collection had stood still for years—a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, another of the Emancipation Proclamation, pictures of Washington, Lincoln and Napoleon, the last held in that household second only to Washington in all history as a "leveler."
The only daughter, Arabella, had been sent to boarding-school in Cincinnati. She married a rich man, lived in the city and, under the inspiration of English novels and the tutelage of a woman friend who visited in New York and often went abroad, was developing ideas of family and class and rank. She talked feelingly of the "lower classes" and of the duty of the "upper class" toward them. Her "goings-on" created an acid prejudice against higher education in her father's mind. As she was unfolding to him a plan for sending Hampden to Harvard he interrupted with, "No MORE idiots in my family at my expense," and started out to feed the pigs. The best terms Hampden's mother could make were that he should not be disinherited and cast off if he went to Battle Field and paid his own way.
He did not tell Pauline all of this, nor did he repeat to her the conversation between himself and his father a few days before he left home.
"Is 'Bella going to pay your way through?" asked his father, looking at him severely—but he looked severely at every one except Hampden's gentle-voiced mother.
"No, sir." The son's voice was clear.
"Is your mother?"