“Have you something else to do when you lose your job? Do you know that one of your Regents, H. P. Denton, owes his appointment to Steve Treadley of the Manistee Button Factory?”
“Rather than be controlled by considerations like that I will lose my job!” Clark replied hotly.
That was the mood in which he marched to his eleven o’clock lecture.
After it, at noon, he came down the central walk amid the sweaters and corduroys and fresh-filled pipes of the gossiping throng which carries books in straps, books in green bags, and books in spilly armfuls. His friend Guthrie of the English Department overtook him.
“What’s this about Vida Martin?” Guthrie inquired. “They say you’re lambasting the University because it won’t let her set up her soap-box in Assembly Hall.”
“Subtract the cheap fling and you have the idea,” Clark answered.
Guthrie shook his fine, big head. “Well,” he reflected, “you’re unmarried. But it isn’t a chip you have on your shoulder. It’s a log.”
“John,” said Clark, “your education is hideously defective. You’ve got to meet Vida Martin and learn what a soapbox is. Come to lunch with her now.”
Guthrie said he couldn’t because his wife was expecting him.
“Telephone her and come,” insisted Clark.