“But what am I to do?” he asked. “I’ve always worked for ten hours a day. I can’t live without work of some kind, and now....”
Susan got up and came across the room to him, with an expression of bright and eager helpfulness.
“Oh! look here, we’ll find a use for you,” she said, laying her hand on his arm. “You’re too old to join the league, of course—”
“I’m thirty-seven,” he interpolated.
“It’s quite young, really,” she comforted him. “I’m twenty-three. But what I was going to say was that we are founding a reference committee of experts of all kinds to advise the league. The members of that committee will have no voice in our decisions, you understand; they’ll be simply advisory. And it would be absolutely splendid to have you as chairman. I shall get no end of prestige from the league for having found you.” Her face shone with the joy of the successful discoverer.
“I understand you to suggest,” Henry Wolverton commented dryly, “that I should devote the rest of my life, and the—er—fruits of my scholarship, to instructing young men and women under twenty-five years of age in the lessons of history; always with the distinct understanding that they are in no way pledged to apply my advice in the prosecution of their own policy?”
Susan did not miss the implications of his tone. “My dear man,” she said, “whatever is the good of scholarship, if it isn’t to advise the young? Surely you haven’t been studying history all these years just in order to swap opinions with all the other old fogies?”
Henry Wolverton turned his back on her and walked over to the window. After a short pause he faced her again and said, “You have a remarkable power of statement, Miss Jeffery. I must admit that I have never before considered the precise use, in the pragmatical sense, to which I might apply my—er—scholarship; and I am ready to grant that your point is a good one. Where your otherwise admirable logic seems to fail, however, is in the admission that though I might turn my knowledge to good effect by advising youth, I may be wasting all my effort since youth will probably not be guided by my teaching.”
“I don’t know much about logic,” replied Susan, “but I should have thought it must be pretty evident to you, to-day of all days, that if we were going to be guided only by the lessons of history, our league would be a back-number in a week. Isn’t it possible for you to get it into your head that history isn’t everything?”
She put her last question with the appealing gesture of a mother addressing a refractory and rather stupid child.