if you're going to worry, Horace is the one you should
worry about. (_answering his look_) Why, he got it all up. He made me
ashamed!

FEJEVARY: And you're not at all ashamed of what you have done?

MADELINE: Ashamed? Why--no.

FEJEVARY: Then you'd better be! A girl who rushes in and assaults an
officer!

MADELINE: (_earnestly explaining it_) But, Uncle Felix, I had to stop
him. No one else did.

FEJEVARY: Madeline, I don't know whether you're trying to be naive--

MADELINE: (_angrily_) Well, I'm _not_. I like that! I think I'll go
home.

FEJEVARY: I think you will not! It's stupid of you not to know this is
serious. You could be dismissed from school for what you did.

MADELINE: Well, I'm good and ready to be dismissed from any school that
would dismiss for that!

FEJEVARY: (_in a new manner--quietly, from feeling_) Madeline, have you
no love for this place?

MADELINE: (_doggedly, after thinking_) Yes, I have. (_she sits down_)
And I don't know why I have.

FEJEVARY: Certainly it's not strange. If ever a girl had a background,
Morton College is Madeline Fejevary Morton's background. (_he too now
seated by the table_) Do you remember your Grandfather Morton?

MADELINE: Not very well. (_a quality which seems sullenness_) I couldn't
bear to look at him. He shook so.

FEJEVARY: (_turning away, real pain_) Oh--how cruel!

MADELINE: (_surprised, gently_) Cruel? Me--cruel?

FEJEVARY: Not just you. The way it passes--(_to himself_) so _fast_ it
passes.

MADELINE: I'm sorry. (_troubled_) You see, he was too old then--

FEJEVARY: (_his hand up to stop her_) I wish I could bring him back for
a moment, so you could see what he was before he (_bitterly_) shook so.
He was a powerful man, who was as real as the earth. He was strangely of
the earth, as if something went from it to him. (_looking at her
intently_) Queer you should be the one to have no sentiment about him,
for you and he--sometimes when I'm with you it's as if--he were near. He
had no personal ambition, Madeline. He was ambitious for the earth and
its people. I wonder if you can realize what it meant to my father--in a
strange land, where he might so easily have been misunderstood, pushed
down, to find a friend like that? It wasn't so much the material
things--though Uncle Silas was always making them right--and as if--oh,
hardly conscious what he was doing--so little it mattered. It was the
way he _got_ father, and by that very valuing kept alive