The Strength of the Strong eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 182 pages of information about The Strength of the Strong.

The Strength of the Strong eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 182 pages of information about The Strength of the Strong.
did.  Instead, he wandered about the deserted buildings and grounds, befriended and misunderstood by the servants and gardeners, reading much, it is remembered, spending his days in the fields or before the fire-place with his nose poked always in the pages of some book.  It was at this time that he over-used his eyes and was compelled to take up the wearing of glasses, which same were so prominent in the photographs of him published in the newspapers in 1941.

He was a remarkable student.  Application such as his would have taken him far; but he did not need application.  A glance at a text meant mastery for him.  The result was that he did an immense amount of collateral reading and acquired more in half a year than did the average student in half-a-dozen years.  In 1909, barely fourteen years of age, he was ready—­“more than ready” the headmaster of the academy said—­to enter Yale or Harvard.  His juvenility prevented him from entering those universities, and so, in 1909, we find him a freshman at historic Bowdoin College.  In 1913 he graduated with highest honours, and immediately afterward followed Professor Bradlough to Berkeley, California.  The one friend that Emil Gluck discovered in all his life was Professor Bradlough.  The latter’s weak lungs had led him to exchange Maine for California, the removal being facilitated by the offer of a professorship in the State University.  Throughout the year 1914, Emil Gluck resided in Berkeley and took special scientific courses.  Toward the end of that year two deaths changed his prospects and his relations with life.  The death of Professor Bradlough took from him the one friend he was ever to know, and the death of Ann Bartell left him penniless.  Hating the unfortunate lad to the last, she cut him off with one hundred dollars.

The following year, at twenty years of age, Emil Gluck was enrolled as an instructor of chemistry in the University of California.  Here the years passed quietly; he faithfully performed the drudgery that brought him his salary, and, a student always, he took half-a-dozen degrees.  He was, among other things, a Doctor of Sociology, of Philosophy, and of Science, though he was known to the world, in later days, only as Professor Gluck.

He was twenty-seven years old when he first sprang into prominence in the newspapers through the publication of his book, Sex and Progress.  The book remains to-day a milestone in the history and philosophy of marriage.  It is a heavy tome of over seven hundred pages, painfully careful and accurate, and startlingly original.  It was a book for scientists, and not one calculated to make a stir.  But Gluck, in the last chapter, using barely three lines for it, mentioned the hypothetical desirability of trial marriages.  At once the newspapers seized these three lines, “played them up yellow,” as the slang was in those days, and set the whole world laughing at Emil Gluck, the bespectacled young professor of

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The Strength of the Strong from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.