"We are bound by ties of a great brotherhood," Huntington explained.
"No man I ever saw before has considered them so sacred. You are an idealist, Huntington. Your devotion to college and to college responsibilities amounts to a fetish. But I thank God for your idealism: it is not what college relations really are but what they ought to be!"
"I never will admit that, Hamlen."
"Of course you won't; if you did you would lose your idealism. I saw all this, and it gave me my explanation: what you have done for me, Huntington, you would have done for any other college man under the same circumstances. It was not because of any claim the individual had upon you, but rather the acknowledgment of the greater appeal made by that brotherhood you venerate."
"No, Hamlen; you must not depreciate the appeal which your own personality made from the first."
"I don't depreciate it,—I'm proud of it; but to understand your idolatrous worship of the brotherhood makes it possible for me to accept the heavy obligations under which you place me. When you left me I felt that you must hate the sight of my haggard face, the sound of my complaining voice, the burden of silly weakness which I foisted upon your generous shoulders."
"I understood what lay beneath."
"You did, and to a wonderful extent; but it took me hours of bitter fighting to understand. Then the bigness of the great central thing at last came to me, and I recognized it. Sitting here in this chair I cried out in my excitement. The littleness of my own previous viewpoint overwhelmed me, and what had seemed tragedies assumed at last their smaller proportions. The greatness of your own ideals, the claim which the Alma Mater ought to have upon her sons, the right which the larger world outside has to demand big things of those to whom it gives advantages, made the petty failures of my life so insignificant that I was ashamed to have paraded them in public. I have been lying down on my weaknesses, Huntington, as no man ever has a right to do; but you have seen the last of that. I'll stand up now and take my medicine, I'll pay whatever penalty my latest indiscretion may demand, I'll practise some of that idealism which makes you what you are, and lay the ghost which for years has tortured me with pin-pricks."
"You give me too much credit, Hamlen," Huntington insisted firmly; "but since you find relief in what I've said or done I rejoice in your exaggeration."
"You claimed my life, my friend," Hamlen returned again to his earlier statement, "and it belongs to you. In all honor, I must make it reflect attributes which will give it value. With that accomplished, I stand ready to make delivery; but with it you must also accept its obligations. How will you have me pay them?"