"Why, certainly! But we must make a right start. An office in your bedroom may go in Eagle's Wing but not in Chicago."
"Oh!" said Roger for a third and last time. And the conference adjourned sine die.
Something about this interview depressed Roger profoundly.
He went home, locked up his drawings and threw an old canvas over the model of the solar engine that had stood for so many years in a corner of the graduate laboratory. It was six months before he could induce himself to touch his work again. And it dawned on him that his twenties were slipping by and that he was becoming unsociable and grave. But there seemed no remedy for the matter. His dream had become the most vital part of his life, and would not let him lead a normal existence. Such is the price that a dreamer pays for his vision.
CHAPTER III
THE NEW DAY
Roger, climbing the steps to the Science Building on the day that he was thirty years old, wondered if his working life was to end as it had begun within its ugly walls.
The building stood at the western edge of the campus. It was a Gothic, Jacobean, Victorian composite, four stories high, built of yellow sandstone, marble and brick. It boasted a round dome, rising from a Gothic main roof and a little pagoda-like tower on each of the mansard roofs that crowned the two wings. There had been a time when to Roger the Science Building had been beautiful. But he saw its ugliness now and laughed about it with Ernest.