“Very well.  That is your affair and hers.  Thank you for coming halfway to meet me.  It made it easier all around.”

The doctor held out his hand and the boy took it eagerly.

“You are great to me, Uncle Phil—­lots better than I deserve.  Please don’t think I don’t see that.  And truly I am awfully ashamed of smashing the car, and not telling you, as I ought to have this morning, and spoiling Tony’s fun and—­and everything.”  Ted swallowed something down hard as if the “everything” included a good deal.  “I don’t see why I have to be always getting into scrapes.  Can’t seem to help it, somehow.  Guess I was made that way, just as Larry was born steady.”

“That is a spineless jellyfish point of view, Ted.  Don’t fool yourself with it.  There is no earthly reason why you should keep drifting from one escapade to another.  Get some backbone into you, son.”

Ted’s face clouded again at that, though he wasn’t sulky this time.  He was remembering some other disagreeable confessions he had to make before long.  He knew this was a good opening for them, but somehow he could not drive himself to follow it up.  He could only digest a limited amount of humble pie at a time and had already swallowed nearly all he could stand.  Still he skirted warily along the edge of the dilemma.

“I suppose you think I made an awful ass of myself at college this year,” he averred gloomily.

“I don’t think it.  I know it.”  The doctor’s eyes twinkled a little.  Then he grew sober.  “Why do you, Ted?  You aren’t really an ass, you know.  If you were, there might be some excuse for behaving like one.”

Ted flushed.

“That’s what Larry told me last spring when he was pitching into me about—­well about something.  I don’t know why I do, Uncle Phil, honest I don’t.  Maybe it is because I hate college so and all the stale old stuff they try to cram down our throats.  I get so mad and sick and disgusted with the whole thing that I feel as if I had to do something to offset it—­something that is real and live, even if it isn’t according to rules and regulations.  I hate rules and regulations.  I’m not a mummy and I don’t want to be made to act as if I were.  I’ll be a long time dead and I want to get a whole lot of fun out of life first.  I hate studying.  I want to do things, Uncle Phil—­”

“Well?”

“I don’t want to go back to college.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Join the Canadian forces.  It makes me sick to have a war going on and me not in it.  Dad quit college for West Point and everybody thought it was all right.  I don’t see why I shouldn’t get into it.  I wouldn’t fall down on that.  I promise you.  I’d make you proud of me instead of ashamed the way you are now.”  The boy’s voice and eyes were unusually earnest.