"I don't know," said the young fellow, "I really don't know, Mother. I can't seem to breathe and expand at home. You've never made things very cheerful for me."
"Oswald! You are utterly heartless!"
"I've been fed up on the governor's kind of religion, on narrow views and gloom; and that's no good for a modern boy. It's a wonder I have any heart at all, and sometimes I think it's dried up——"
"That will do!" shouted Grismer, losing all self-control. "If your home, your parents, and your Creator can not make a Christian of you, there is nothing to hope from you! ... I'll hear no more from you. Go and get ready for church!"
"I sha'n't go," said the young fellow calmly.
When he went back to Cambridge at the end of the week, it was with the desire never to see his home again, and with a vague and burning intention to get even, somehow, by breaking every law of the imbecile religion on which he had been "fed up."
CHAPTER VIII
When Stephanie was fifteen years old, John Cleland took her to Cambridge.
The girl had been attending a celebrated New York school during the last two years. She had developed the bearing and manners which characterized the carefully trained products of that institution, but the régime seemed to have subdued her, and made her retiring and diffident.
She could have formed friendships there had she desired to do so; she formed none; yet any girl there would have been happy and flattered to call Stephanie Quest her friend. But Stephanie cared little for those confidential and intimate relations so popular among school girls of her age.