“Wants me to come in January,” John explained. “Says they’ll guarantee my board and keep for running errands and attending to collections; and I can go on studying and be ready for my exams in the spring just the same. So I’ll be in the city for keeps after Christmas. Grand man, the Judge. Found I was washing automobiles at night to pay for my room over Westlake’s garage and he just couldn’t stand it. There’s a friend, I say!”
He waited for her to laugh and laughed with her. It was enormously funny that among other jobs he washed automobiles on his way to the chief justiceship!
“Nothing can keep you back, John. You’re like the men we read about, who strike right out for the top and get there and plant their flag on the battlements.”
“Don’t say a word! There’s luck as well as hard work in this business of getting on. All summer I used to think about it—out in the fields in Kansas. A big, hot harvest field’s a grand place for healthy thought. I say, Grace, life’s a lot more complicated than it used to be. Things all sort o’ mixed up since the war.”
“You really believe the world’s so different, John? Everybody’s saying that and the papers and magazines are full of stuff about the changes and knocking our generation.”
“Don’t let that talk throw you! It’s up to all of us to sit tight on the toboggan and wait till she slows down. There’s a lot of good in this grand old world yet. By the way, it was hard luck you had to quit college. Excuse me for mentioning it, but I just wanted you to know I was sorry you left.”
“Oh, it’s all right, John. I miss the good times but there’s no use crying. I’m ashamed now, though, to think how I just fooled along. I ought to have got more out of it than I did.”
“You don’t know how much you got,” he replied quickly. “Kind of a mystery what we get and what we don’t. We got to keep braced for anything we bump into. When the war came along I thought that was the end of me so far as going into the law was concerned, but being shot at by the Kaiser sort o’ made me mad. I wasn’t going to let a little thing like that stop me; so my life being providentially spared, I thought it all out on the ship coming home—on the deck at night with the stars blinking at me. I’ve got health and a fair second-rate head and I’m going to give the world a good wrestle before I quit.”
“Fine!” she exclaimed, noting the lifting of his head as he swung along in the gathering dusk. “You make me ashamed of myself, John. I think I’ve begun to drift—I don’t know what I’m headed for.”
“We all think we’re drifting when we’re not! It’s in the back of our minds all the time that we’re aiming for something,” he replied; “we don’t fool ourselves there!”