I looked out of the window and nodded, somewhat haughtily. Of course I couldn’t explain to dad the mixture of feelings that led me to choose scholarship. For, while I am keen on philology, and really do love the classics so that my spirit seems to swim, if you know what I mean, in the atmosphere that upheld Horace and the wise Cicero of 'De Senectute,' I also thought there was money enough in the family already. Wasn’t it a good thing for the Bonniwells to pay tribute to the humanities in my person? Didn’t we, somehow, owe it to the world to put back in culture part of what we took out in cash? But how could I get that across to dad?
He looked at me as if he, too, were trying to utter something difficult.
'There are passions of the head as well as of the heart,' he said finally. I opened my eyes, for he didn’t often talk in such fashion. 'The old Greeks knew that. I always supposed a scholar, a teacher, had to feel that way if he was any good—that it was the mark of his calling. Perhaps you’ve been called; but, if so, you keep it pretty dark.'
He stopped and waited for an appropriate response, but I just couldn’t get it out. So I remarked, 'If I’m not on the boat this summer, you’ll need another man when you cruise.'
'That’s my affair,' said he, looking disappointed. 'Yours will be to hold down your job. I’ve got one ready for you. If you don’t like it, you can get another. We’ll see about a Ph.D. and Germany later on. But for this season, I had influence enough to get you the summer school in the Jericho district beyond Garibaldi, and you can board with Seth Miles.'
When I was a child, before we moved to Chicago, we lived in Oatesville, at the back of beyond. Garibaldi is an Indiana cross-roads about five miles farther on the road to nowhere.
'O dad!' I said; but I put everything I thought into those two words.
He instantly began to look as much like the heavy father on the stage as is possible to a spare man with a Roman nose. So I shrugged my shoulders.
'Oh, very well!' I said. 'If you find me a fossil in the fall, pick out a comfortable museum to lend me to, won’t you?'
'Richard.' said my dad, 'God only knows how a boy should be dealt with. I don’t. If I could only tell you the things I know so you would believe them, I’d set a match to half my fortune this minute. I want you to touch life somewhere, but I don’t know how to work it in. I’m doing this in sheer desperation.'