But Anna Guthrie was not prepared to take John’s grouping of himself and her as two human beings who had something to learn from a third. She was hurt that her husband should find in another woman something valuable which she herself lacked, and she thought him perfectly brutal in the bald way he
came out with it. Things like that which would hurt people ought to be concealed. She herself concealed such things.
“Practising sincerity is like making a bargain,” Guthrie reflected. “It takes two. Not everyone is ready for it.”
To Vida arriving with Clark for dinner, Mrs. Guthrie was conventionally gracious—a manner she put on as she took off the all-over apron which protected her next to best dress in the hot kitchen. The green young Bohemian girl there was chiefly useful to Mrs. Guthrie as a topic of heartfelt conversation.
Vida avoided it by starting some talk with Lucy and Harold, aged ten and eight, who sat at a little table behind her. By the time she had them laughing Mrs. Guthrie’s prejudice began to thaw.
Their father noted their expressiveness with Vida. “They get it too,” he reflected. “They’re more human than I’ve realized. Anna and I have had too much the ideal of a child as a little obeying machine.”
When Mrs. Guthrie heard that the evening paper had a story about Vida’s exclusion from the University and Clark’s insubordination, she was perturbed by the question: “What will the President’s wife say of my having such a woman to dinner?”
The discussion which gave that dinner its importance sprang from Guthrie’s deploring, à propos of the danger of Clark’s dismissal, the fact that a professor could not act in accordance with his own judgment in such a matter without endangering his position. He gave a dozen instances of tyranny which seemed to have created in him only a sort of reflected personal resentment against particular presidents and regents.
“Why do you scholars allow the power to remove you to be placed in the hands of outsiders like the regents?” asked Vida, whose mind worked promptly from individuals to the system they stood for.
“Oh, that can’t be changed,” said Guthrie, off-hand.