“What is it you want to know?”
“Well, that’s something you can’t say; you don’t know just what you’ll get till you’ve got it. But I have a feeling, I want to know more about things.”
Dad looked forlorn—pitifully, but quite innocently and unintentionally. “It means you jist ain’t interested in oil.”
“Well, no, Dad, that’s not quite fair. I can study for a while and then come back to the business.”
But Dad knew better than that. “No, son, if you go to college, you’ll get so high up above us oil fellers, you won’t know we’re here. If you mean to be an oil man, the thing to study is oil.”
“Well, Dad, the truth is, I’m really too young to know what I want to be. If I wanted to do something else, surely we’ve got money enough—”
“It’s not the money, son, it’s the job. You know how I feel—I like to have you with me—”
“I don’t mean to go away,” Bunny hastened to put in. “There’s plenty of colleges around here, and I can live at home. And we can come up for week-ends and holidays, the same as always. I’m not going to lose my interest in Paradise, Dad, but I really won’t be happy to buckle down to business until I’ve had a chance to learn more.”
Dad had to give way to that. There was that curious war in his own mind, a mingling of respect for knowledge, of awe in the presence of cultured people, along with fear of “notions” that Bunny might get, strange flights of “idealism” that would make him unfit to be the heir and custodian of twenty million dollars worth of Ross Consolidated!