He stopped. They had listened silently, with interested grunts of “Amen, Brother.”
“Honest, it was awful’ impressive. Somehow, something has made me feel so much better than when I went away from here. I’m sure it was a real Call. Don’t you think so, President?”
“Oh, I’m sure of it!” the president ejaculated, getting up hastily and rubbing his knees.
“I feel that all is right with our brother; that he has now, this sacred moment, heard the voice of God, and is entering upon the highest calling in the sight of God,” the president observed to the dean. “Don’t you feel so?”
“God be praised,” said the dean, and looked at his watch.
III
On their way home, they two alone, the oldest faculty-member said to the dean, “Yes, it was a fine gratifying moment. And—herumph!—slightly surprising. I’d hardly thought that young Gantry would go on being content with the mild blisses of salvation. Herumph! Curious smell of peppermint he had about him.”
“I suppose he stopped at the drug-store during his walk and had a soft-drink of some kind. Don’t know, Brother,” said the dean, “that I approve of these soft drinks. Innocent in themselves, but they might lead to carelessness in beverages; A man who drinks ginger ale—how are you going to impress on him the terrible danger of drinking ale?”
“Yes, yes,” said the oldest faculty-member (he was sixty-eight, to the dean’s boyish sixty). “Say, Brother, how do you feel about young Gantry? About his entering the ministry? I know you did well in the pulpit before you came here, as I more or less did myself, but if you were a boy of twenty-one or -two, do you think you’d become a preacher now, way things are?”
“Why, Brother!” grieved the dean. “Certainly I would! What a question! What would become of all our work at Terwillinger, all our ideals in opposition to the heathenish large universities, if the ministry weren’t the highest ideal—”