To J.W. came just one indication of the change that college had made.  Pastor Drury, though he found it wise to do much of his important work in secret, thought to make use of the college-consciousness which most towns possess in June, and which is felt especially, though not confessed, by the college colony.  The year’s diplomas are still very new in June.  So a college night was announced for the social rooms, with a college sermon to follow on the next Sunday night.  The League and the Senior Sunday School Department united to send a personal invitation to every college graduate in town, and to every student home for the vacation.  They responded, four score of them, to the college-night call.

As J.W. moved about and greeted people he had known for years he began to realize that college has its own freemasonry.  These other graduates were from all sorts of schools; two had been to Harvard, and one to Princeton; several were State University alumni.  Cartwright was represented by nine, six of them undergraduates, and the others confessed themselves as being from Chicago, Syracuse, De Pauw, three or four sorts of “Wesleyan,” Northwestern, Knox, Wabash, Western Reserve, and many more.

Not even all Methodist, by any means, J.W. perceived; and yet the fellowship among these strangers was very real.  They spoke each other’s tongue; they had common interests and common experiences.  He told himself that here was a suggestion as to the new friends he might make in Delafield, without forgetting the old ones.  And the prospect of life in Delafield began to take on new values.

On the next Sunday night not so many college people were out to hear Mr. Drury’s straight-thinking and plain-spoken sermon on “What our town asks of its college-trained youth”; and a few of those who came were inclined to resent what they called a lecture on manners and duty.

But to J.W. the sermon was precisely the challenge to service he had been looking for.  It made up for his feeling at commencement that he was “out of it.”  It completed all which Mr. Drury had suggested at the Institute camp fire four years ago, all that he himself had tried to say at the decision service on the day after the camp fire; all that the pastor had urged two years ago when J.W., Jr., confessed to him his new hesitations and uneasiness.

The pastor had not preached any great thing.  He had simply told the college folk in his audience that no matter where they had gone to school, many people had invested much in them, and that the investment was one which in its very nature could not be realized on by the original investors.  The only possible beneficiaries were either the successive college generations or the communities in which they found their place.  If they chose to take as personal and unconditional all the benefits of their education, none could forbid them that anti-social choice; but if they accepted education as a trust, a stewardship, something to be used for the common good, they would be worth more to Delafield than all the new factories the Chamber of Commerce could coax to the town.