he room.

"What do you think?" he demanded. "I had luncheon with Wilcox."

Wilcox was the superannuated president of the university, whose withered
mind was stored with generalizations that were young in 1870, and which
he had since failed to revise.

"I was invited," father announced. "I was sent for."

He paused, and we waited.

"Oh, it was done very nicely, I'll allow; but I was reprimanded. I! And
by that old fossil!"

"I'll wager I know what you were reprimanded for," Ernest said.

"Not in three guesses," father laughed.

"One guess will do," Ernest retorted. "And it won't be a guess. It will
be a deduction. You were reprimanded for your private life."

"The very thing!" father cried. "How did you guess?"

"I knew it was coming. I warned you before about it."

"Yes, you did," father meditated. "But I couldn't believe it. At any
rate, it is only so much more clinching evidence for my book."

"It is nothing to what will come," Ernest went on, "if you persist in
your policy of having these socialists and radicals of all sorts at your
house, myself included."

"Just what old Wilcox said. And of all unwarranted things! He said it
was in poor taste, utterly profitless, anyway, and not in harmony with
university traditions and policy. He said much more of the same vague
sort, and I couldn't pin him down to anything specific. I made it pretty
awkward for him, and he could only go on repeating himself and telling
me how much he honored me, and all the world honored me, as a scientist.
It wasn't an agreeable task for him. I could see he didn't like it."

"He was not a free agent," Ernest said. "The leg-bar* is not always worn
graciously."

* LEG-BAR--the African slaves were so manacled; also
criminals. It was not until the coming of the Brotherhood
of Man that the leg-bar passed out of use.

"Yes. I got that much out of him. He said the university needed ever
so much more money this year than the state was willing to furnish; and
that it must come from wealthy personages who could not but be offended
by the swerving of the university from its high ideal of the passionless
pursuit of passionless intelligence. When I tried to pin him down to
what my home life had to do with swerving the university from its high
ideal, he offered me a two years' vacation, on full pay, in Europe,
for recreation and research. Of course I couldn't accept it under the
circumstances."

"It would have been far bet