HOLDEN:  I don’t admit you can talk to me as you please and that I can’t talk to you.  I’m a professor—­not a servant.

FEJEVARY:  Yes, and you’re a damned difficult professor.  I certainly have tried to—­

HOLDEN:  (smiling) Handle me?

FEJEVARY:  I ask you this.  Do you know any other institution where you could sit and talk with the executive head as you have here with me?

HOLDEN:  I don’t know.  Perhaps not.

FEJEVARY:  Then be reasonable.  No one is entirely free.  That’s naive.  It’s rather egotistical to want to be.  We’re held by our relations to others—­by our obligations to the (vaguely)—­the ultimate thing.  Come now—­you admit certain dissatisfactions with yourself, so—­why not go with intensity into just the things you teach—­and not touch quite so many other things?

HOLDEN:  I couldn’t teach anything if I didn’t feel free to go wherever that thing took me.  Thirty years ago I was asked to come to this college precisely because my science was not in isolation, because of my vivid feeling of us as a moment in a long sweep, because of my faith in the greater beauty our further living may unfold.

(HARRY enters.)

HARRY:  Excuse me.  Miss Morton is here now, Mr Fejevary.

FEJEVARY:  (frowns, hesitates) Ask her to come up here in five minutes (After HARRY has gone) I think we’ve thrown a scare into Madeline.  I thought as long as she’d been taken to jail it would be no worse for us to have her stay there awhile.  She’s been held since one o’clock.  That ought to teach her reason.

HOLDEN:  Is there a case against her?

FEJEVARY:  No, I got it fixed up.  Explained that it was just college girl foolishness—­wouldn’t happen again.  One reason I wanted this talk with you first, if I do have any trouble with Madeline I want you to help me.

HOLDEN:  Oh, I can’t do that.

FEJEVARY:  You aren’t running out and clubbing the police.  Tell her she’ll have to think things over and express herself with a little more dignity.

HOLDEN:  I ask to be excused from being present while you talk with her.

FEJEVARY:  But why not stay in the library—­in case I should need you.  Just take your books over to the east alcove and go on with what you were doing when I came in.

HOLDEN:  (with a faint smile) I fear I can hardly do that.  As to
Madeline—­

FEJEVARY:  You don’t want to see the girl destroy herself, do you?  I confess I’ve always worried about Madeline.  If my sister had lived—­But Madeline’s mother died, you know, when she was a baby.  Her father—­well, you and I talked that over just the other day—­there’s no getting to him.  Fred never worried me a bit—­just the fine normal boy.  But Madeline—­(with an effort throwing it off) Oh, it’ll be all right, I haven’t a doubt.  And it’ll be all right between you and me, won’t it?  Caution over a hard strip of the road, then—­bigger things ahead.