“For him and for Elinor—and for myself. Don't hate me, Dennie. Elinor looks upon me as her future husband. I have promised to provide for her with the comforts denied her by her father, and I have lived in the ambition of holding that Harvard chair—Oh, it is all a hopeless tangle. I could never go to Victor Burleigh now. He would not believe that I had been ignorant of his claim all this time. He was never wrapped up in the pursuit of a career—Oh, Dennie, Dennie, what shall I do?”
He rose to his feet and Dennie stood up before him. He gently rested his hands on her shoulders and looked down at her.
“What shall you do?” Dennie repeated, slowly. “Whisky, Money, Ambition—the appetite that destroys! Vincent Burgess, if you want to win a Master's Degree, win to the Mastery of Manhood first. The sins of the fathers, yours and mine, we cannot undo. But you can be a man.”
She had put her dimpled hands on his arms as they stood there, and the brave courage of her upturned face called back again the rainy May night, and the face of Victor Burleigh beside Bug Buler's cot, and his low voice as he said:
“I cannot play in tomorrow's game and be a man.”
CHAPTER XII. THE SILVER PITCHER
A picket frozen on duty—
A mother starved for her brood—
Socrates drinking the hemlock,
And Jesus on the rood.
And millions who, humble and nameless,
The straight hard pathway trod—
Some call it Consecration,
And others call it God.
—WILLIAM HERBERT CARRUTH
“DR. FENNEBEN, I should like much to dismiss my classes for the afternoon,” Professor Burgess said to the Dean in his study the next day.
“Very well, Professor, I am afraid you are overworked with all my duties added to yours here. But you don't look it,” Fenneben said, smiling.