-even Morty arrayed in
his college clothes, like Solomon, would have to wait until the fancy
for Grant had passed. So Morty backed Grant with all his pocket money as
a ball player while he fluttered rather gayly about Ave Calvin--and
always with an effect of inadvertence.

Now if a lad is an ass--and he is--how should a poor jack be supposed to
know of the wisdom of the serpent? For we must remember that early youth
has been newly driven from the heart of that paradise wherein there is
no good and evil. He gropes in darkness as he comes nearer the gates of
his paradise, through an unchartered wilderness. But to Mary and Amos,
Grant seemed to be wandering in the very midst of his Eden. They did not
realize how he was groping and stumbling, nor could they know what a
load he carried--this ass of a lad coming toward the gate of the Garden.
In those times when he sat in his room, trying to show his soul
bashfully to Laura Nesbit as he wrote to her in Maryland at school,
Grant felt always, over and about him, the consciousness of the spell of
Margaret Mueller, yet he did not know what the spell was. He wrestled
with it when finally he came rather dimly to sense it, and tried with
all the strength of his ungainly soul to be loyal to the choice of his
heart. His will was loyal, yet the smiles, the eyes, the soft tempting
face of Margaret always were near him. Furious storms of feeling swayed
him. For youth is the time of tempest. In our teens come those floods of
soul stuff through the gates of heredity, swinging open for the last
time in life, floods that bring into the world the stores of the
qualities of mind and heart from outside ourselves; floods stored in
Heaven's reservoir, gushing from the almost limitlessly deep springs of
our ancestry; floods which draw us in resistless currents to our
destinies. And so the ass, laden with this relay of life from the source
of life, that every young, blind ass brings into the world, floundered
in the flood.

Grant thought his experience was unique. Yet it is the common lot of
man. To feel his soul exposed at a thousand new areas of sense; to see a
new heaven and a new earth--strange, mysterious, beautiful, unfolding to
his eyes; to smell new scents; to hear new sounds in the woods and
fields; to look open-eyed and wondering at new relations of things that
unfold in the humdrum world about him, as he flees out of the blind
paradise of childhood; to dream new dreams; to aspire to new