notice from the president's office, commanding Carl's instant presence, was in his post-office box. He slouched into the waiting-room of the offices of the president and dean. He was an incarnate desire to say exactly what he thought to the round, woolly President Wood.
Plain Albert Smith was leaving the waiting-room. He seized Carl's hand with his plowman's paw, and, "Good-by, boy," he growled. There was nothing gallant about his appearance—his blue-flannel shirt dusty with white fuzz, his wrinkled brick-red neck, the oyster-like ear at which he kept fumbling with a seamy finger-nail of his left hand. But Carl's salute was a salute to the new king.
"How d'you mean 'good-by,' Al?"
"I've just resigned from Plato, Carl."
"How'd you happen to do that? Did they summon you here?"
"No. Just resigned," said Plain Smith. "One time when I was school-teaching I had a set-to with a school committee of farmers about teaching the kids a little botany. They said the three R's were enough. I won out, but I swore I'd stand up for any teacher that tried to be honest the way he seen it. I don't agree with Frazer about these socialists and all—fellow that's worked at the plow like I have knows a man wants to get ahead for his woman and himself, first of all, and let the walking-delegates go to work, too. But I think he's honest, all right, and, well, I stood up, and that means losing my scholarship. They won't try to fire me. Guess I'll mosey on to the U. of M. Can't probably live there as cheap as here, but a cousin of mine owns a big shoe-store and maybe I can get a job with him.... Boy, you were plucky to get up.... Glad we've got each other, finally. I feel as though you'd freed me from something. God bless you."
To the dean's assistant, in the waiting-room, Carl grandly stated: "Ericson, 1908. I'm to see the president."
"It's been arranged you're to see the dean instead. Sit down. Dean's engaged just now."
Carl was kept waiting for a half-hour. He did not like the transference to the dean, who was no anxious old lamb like S. Alcott Wood, but a young collegiate climber, with a clipped mustache, a gold eye-glass chain over one ear, a curt voice, many facts, a spurious appreciation of music, and no mellowness. He was a graduate of the University of Chicago, and aggressively proud of it. He had "earned his way through college," which all tradition and all fiction pronounce the perfect manner of acquiring a noble independence and financial ability. Indeed, the blessing of early poverty is in general praised as the perfect training for acquiring enough wealth to save one's own children from the curse of early poverty. It would be safer to malign George Washington and the Boy Scouts, professional baseball and the Y. M. C. A., than to suggest that working one's way through college is not necessarily manlier than playing and dreaming and reading one's way through.
Diffidently, without generalizing, the historian reports this fact about the dean; he had lost the graciousness of his rustic clergyman father and developed an itchingly bustling manner, a tremendous readiness for taking charge of everything in sight, by acquiring during his undergraduate days a mastery of all the petty ways of earning money, such as charging meek and stupid wealthy students too much for private tutoring, and bullying his classmates into patronizing the laundry whose agent he was.... The dean stuck his little finger far out into the air when drinking from a cup, and liked to be taken for a well-dressed man of the world.