But it was before this that father returned one afternoon.  Ernest was with me, and we could see that father was angry—­philosophically angry.  He was rarely really angry; but a certain measure of controlled anger he allowed himself.  He called it a tonic.  And we could see that he was tonic-angry when he entered the room.

“What do you think?” he demanded.  “I had luncheon with Wilcox.”

Wilcox was the superannuated president of the university, whose withered mind was stored with generalizations that were young in 1870, and which he had since failed to revise.

“I was invited,” father announced.  “I was sent for.”

He paused, and we waited.

“Oh, it was done very nicely, I’ll allow; but I was reprimanded.  I!  And by that old fossil!”

“I’ll wager I know what you were reprimanded for,” Ernest said.

“Not in three guesses,” father laughed.

“One guess will do,” Ernest retorted.  “And it won’t be a guess.  It will be a deduction.  You were reprimanded for your private life.”

“The very thing!” father cried.  “How did you guess?”

“I knew it was coming.  I warned you before about it.”

“Yes, you did,” father meditated.  “But I couldn’t believe it.  At any rate, it is only so much more clinching evidence for my book.”

“It is nothing to what will come,” Ernest went on, “if you persist in your policy of having these socialists and radicals of all sorts at your house, myself included.”

“Just what old Wilcox said.  And of all unwarranted things!  He said it was in poor taste, utterly profitless, anyway, and not in harmony with university traditions and policy.  He said much more of the same vague sort, and I couldn’t pin him down to anything specific.  I made it pretty awkward for him, and he could only go on repeating himself and telling me how much he honored me, and all the world honored me, as a scientist.  It wasn’t an agreeable task for him.  I could see he didn’t like it.”

“He was not a free agent,” Ernest said.  “The leg-bar* is not always worn graciously.”

     * Leg-bar—­the African slaves were so manacled; also
     criminals.  It was not until the coming of the Brotherhood
     of Man that the leg-bar passed out of use.

“Yes.  I got that much out of him.  He said the university needed ever so much more money this year than the state was willing to furnish; and that it must come from wealthy personages who could not but be offended by the swerving of the university from its high ideal of the passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence.  When I tried to pin him down to what my home life had to do with swerving the university from its high ideal, he offered me a two years’ vacation, on full pay, in Europe, for recreation and research.  Of course I couldn’t accept it under the circumstances.”

“It would have been far better if you had,” Ernest said gravely.