HOLDEN:  (taking it up) ’Born of the fight for freedom and the aspiration to richer living, we believe that Morton College—­rising as from the soil itself—­may strengthen all those here and everywhere who fight for the life there is in freedom, and may, to the measure it can, loosen for America the beauty that breathes from knowledge.’ (moved by the words he has spoken) Do you know, I would rather do that—­really do that—­than—­grow big.

FEJEVARY:  Yes.  But you see, or rather, what you don’t see is, you have to look at the world in which you find yourself.  The only way to stay alive is to grow big.  It’s been hard, but I have tried to—­carry on.

HOLDEN:  And so have I tried to carry on.  But it is very hard—­carrying on a dream.

FEJEVARY:  Well, I’m trying to make it easier.

HOLDEN:  Make it easier by destroying the dream?

FEJEVARY:  Not at all.  What I want is scope for dreams.

HOLDEN:  Are you sure we’d have the dreams after we’ve paid this price for the scope?

FEJEVARY:  Now let’s not get rhetorical with one another.

HOLDEN:  Mr Fejevary, you have got to let me be as honest with you as you say you are being with me.  You have got to let me say what I feel.

FEJEVARY:  Certainly.  That’s why I wanted this talk with you.

HOLDEN:  You say you have made sacrifices for Morton College.  So have I.

FEJEVARY:  How well I know that.

HOLDEN:  You don’t know all of it.  I’m not sure you understand any of it.

FEJEVARY:  (charmingly) Oh, I think you’re hard on me.

HOLDEN:  I spoke of the tenth anniversary.  I was a young man then, just home from Athens, (pulled back into an old feeling) I don’t know why I felt I had to go to Greece.  I knew then that I was going to teach something within sociology, and I didn’t want anything I felt about beauty to be left out of what I formulated about society.  The Greeks—­

FEJEVARY:  (as HOLDEN has paused before what he sees) I remember you told me the Greeks were the passion of your student days.

HOLDEN:  Not so much because they created beauty, but because they were able to let beauty flow into their lives—­to create themselves in beauty.  So as a romantic young man (smiles), it seemed if I could go where they had been—­what I had felt might take form.  Anyway, I had a wonderful time there.  Oh, what wouldn’t I give to have again that feeling of life’s infinite possibilities!

FEJEVARY:  (nodding) A youthful feeling.

HOLDEN:  (softly) I like youth.  Well, I was just back, visiting my sister here, at the time of the tenth anniversary.  I had a chance then to go to Harvard as instructor.  A good chance, for I would have been under a man who liked me.  But that afternoon I heard your father speak about books.  I talked with Silas Morton.  I found myself telling him about Greece.  No one had ever felt it as he felt it.  It seemed to become of the very bone of him.