"And you expect to acquire that result at Harvard?"
"I hope so."
"Well, you may," remarked Mr. Carter, with a sceptical shrug of his shoulders, "but I doubt it. You will probably fritter away your time and your father's money in boat-racing, football, and fraternity dramatics; that is what it usually amounts to."
"It has got to amount to more than that with me," Paul declared soberly.
"Why?"
"Because Dad is not rich, and hasn't the money to throw away."
A silence fell upon the room.
"I should think that under those circumstances you would do much better to cut out a frilly education and go to work after you finish your high school course," observed the magnate deliberately. "Suppose I were to make you a good business offer? Suppose I were to take over that school paper of yours at the end of June—"
"Wait a moment. Then suppose I took you in here at a good salary and let you keep on with this March Hare job? Not, of course, in precisely its present form but along the same general lines. We could make a paying proposition out of that paper, I am sure of it. It would need a good deal of improving," continued the great man in a pompous, patronizing tone, "but there is an idea there that could be developed into something worth while, unless I am very much mistaken."