ome good if I say it was
something of a literary achievement, if not a moral one."

"Thank you, sir," I faltered.

"Have you ever," he inquired, lapsing a little into his lecture-room
manner, "seriously thought of literature as a career? Have you ever
thought of any career seriously?"

"I once wished to be a writer, sir," I replied tremulously, but
refrained from telling him of my father's opinion of the profession.
Ambition--a purer ambition than I had known for years--leaped within me
at his words. He, Alonzo Cheyne, had detected in me the Promethean fire!

I sat there until ten o'clock talking to the real Mr. Cheyne, a human
Mr. Cheyne unknown in the lecture-room. Nor had I suspected one in
whom cynicism and distrust of undergraduates (of my sort) seemed so
ingrained, of such idealism. He did not pour it out in preaching;
delicately, unobtrusively and on the whole rather humorously he managed
to present to me in a most disillusionizing light that conception of the
university held by me and my intimate associates. After I had left him
I walked the quiet streets to behold as through dissolving mists another
Harvard, and there trembled in my soul like the birth-struggle of a
flame something of the vision later to be immortalized by St. Gaudens,
the spirit of Harvard responding to the spirit of the Republic--to the
call of Lincoln, who voiced it. The place of that bronze at the corner
of Boston Common was as yet empty, but I have since stood before it to
gaze in wonder at the light shining in darkness on mute, uplifted faces,
black faces! at Harvard's son leading them on that the light might live
and prevail.

I, too, longed for a Cause into which I might fling myself, in which
I might lose myself... I halted on the sidewalk to find myself staring
from the opposite side of the street at a familiar house, my old
landlady's, Mrs. Bolton's, and summoned up before me was the tired,
smiling face of Hermann Krebs. Was it because when he had once spoken so
crudely of the University I had seen the reflection of her spirit in his
eyes? A light still burned in the extension roof--Krebs's light; another
shone dimly through the ground glass of the front door. Obeying a sudden
impulse, I crossed the street.

Mrs. Bolton, in the sky-blue wrapper, and looking more forbidding
than ever, answered the bell. Life had taught her to be indifferent to
surprises, and it was I who became abruptly embarrassed.

"Oh, it's you, Mr. Paret,"