So it happened that the Marshall children heard no forebodings about the future, but only heated statements of what seemed to their father the right of a teacher to say what he believed.  Professor Marshall had gone of his own initiative to face the legislative committee which was “investigating” him, had quite lost his temper (never very securely held in leash), had told them his highly spiced opinion of their strictures on his teaching and of the worth of any teacher they could find who would submit to them.  Then he had gone home and put on his overalls.  This last was rather a rhetorical flourish; for his cosmopolitan, urban youth had left him ineradicably ignorant of the processes of agriculture.  But like all Professor Marshall’s flourishes it was a perfectly sincere one.  He was quite cheerfully prepared to submit himself to his wife’s instruction in the new way of life.

All these picturesque facts, as was inevitable in America, had instantly reached the newspapers, which, lacking more exciting news for the moment, took that matter up with headlined characterizations of Professor Marshall as a “martyr of the cause of academic freedom,” and other rather cheap phrases about “persecution” and “America, the land of free speech.”  The legislative committee, alarmed, retreated from its position.  Professor Marshall had not “been obliged to hand in his resignation,” but quite the contrary, had become the hero of the hour and was warmly complimented by his colleagues, who hoped to profit by an action which none of them would have dared to imitate.  It had been an exciting drama to the Marshall children as long as it lasted.  They had looked with pride at an abominable reproduction of their father’s photograph in the evening paper of La Chance, and they had added an acquaintance with the manners of newspaper reporters to their already very heterogeneous experience with callers of every variety; but of real anxiety the episode had brought them nothing.

As to that same extraordinary assortment of visitors at the Marshall house, one of the University co-eds had said facetiously that you met there every sort of person in the world, from spiritualists to atheists—­everybody except swells.  The atheist of her dictum was the distinguished and misanthropic old Professor Kennedy, head of the Department of Mathematics, whose ample means and high social connections with the leading family of La Chance made his misanthropy a source of much chagrin to the faculty ladies, and who professed for the Marshalls, for Mrs. Marshall in particular, a wrong-headed admiration which was inexplicable to the wives of the other professors.  The faculty circle saw little to admire in the Marshalls.  The spiritualist of the co-ed’s remark was, of course, poor foolish Cousin Parnelia, the children’s pet detestation, whose rusty clothes and incoherent speech they were prevented from ridiculing only by stern pressure from their mother.  She always wore a black straw hat, summer and winter, always carried