"I thought you was going through college all so fast?"

"Well, I've made up my mind it ain't much use to try," replied Albert
listlessly.

"What y' goin' t' do here, or are y' goin' t' take the girl away with
yeh?"

"She can't leave her mother. We'll run this boarding house for the
present. I'll try for the principalship of the school here. Raff is
going to resign, he says; if I can't get that, I'll get into a law
office here. Don't worry about me."

"But why go into this so quick? Why not put it off fifteen or twenty
years?" asked Hartley, trying to get back to cheerful voice.

"What would be the use? At the end of a year I'd be just about as poor
as I am now."

"Can't y'r father step in and help you?"

"No. There are three boys and two girls, all younger than I, to be
looked out for, and he has all he can carry. Besides, _she_ needs me
right here and right now. Two delicate women struggling along; suppose
one of 'em should fall sick? I tell you they need me, and if I can do
anything to make life easy, or easier, I'm going t' do it. Besides," he
ended in a peculiar tone, "we don't feel as if we could live apart much
longer."

"But, great Scott! man, you can't----"

"Now, hold on, Jim! I've thought this thing all over, and I've made up
my mind. It ain't any use to go on talking about it. What good would it
do me to go to school another year, come out without a dollar, and no
more fitted for earning a living for her than I am now? And, besides all
that, I couldn't draw a free breath thinking of her here workin' away to
keep things moving, liable at any minute to break down."

Hartley gazed at him in despair, and with something like awe. It was a
tremendous transformation in the young, ambitious student. He felt in a
way responsible for the calamity, and that he ought to use every effort
to bring the boy to his senses.

Like most men in America, and especially Western men, he still clung to
the idea that a man was entirely responsible for his success or failure
in life. He had not admitted that conditions of society might be so
adverse that only men of most exceptional endowments, and willing and
able to master many of the best and deepest and most sacred of their
inspirations and impulses, could succeed.

Of the score of specially promising young fellows who had been with him
at school, seventeen had dropped out and down. Most of them had married
and gone back to farming, or to earn a precarious living