For once, West left his trustees thoroughly disgusted and out of humor.

“Why, why are we doomed to this invincible hostility to a new idea?” he cried, in the bitterness of his soul.  “Here is the spirit of progress not merely beckoning to us, but fairly springing into our laps, and because it speaks in accents that were unfamiliar to the slave patriarchy of a hundred years ago, we drag it outside the city and crucify it.  I tell you these old Bourbons whom we call leaders are millstones around our necks, and we can never move an inch until we’ve laid the last one of them under the sod.”

Sharlee Weyland, to whom he repeated this thought, though she was all sympathy with his difficulties, did not nevertheless think that this was quite fair.  “Look,” she said, “at the tremendous progress we’ve made in the last ten years.”

“Yes,” he flashed back at her, “and who can say that a state like Massachusetts, with the same incomparable opportunities, wouldn’t have made ten times as much!”

But he was the best-natured man alive, and his vexation soon faded.  In a week, he was once more busy planning out ways and means.  He sought funds in the metropolis no more, and the famous financier spared him the mortification of having to refuse a donation by considerately not offering one.  But he continued to make addresses in the State, and in the city he was in frequent demand.  However, the endowment fund remained obstinately immovable.  By February there had been no additions, unless we can count five hundred dollars promised by dashing young Beverley Byrd on the somewhat whimsical condition that his brother Stewart would give an equal amount.

“Moreover,” said young Mr. Byrd, “I’ll increase it to seven hundred and fifty dollars if your friend Winter will publicly denounce me as a boocaneer.  It’ll help me in my business to be lined up with Rockefeller and all those Ikes.”

But this gift never materialized at all, for the reason that Stewart Byrd kindly but firmly refused to give anything.  A rich vein of horse-sense underlay Byrd’s philanthropic enthusiasms; and even the necessity for the continued existence of old Blaines College appeared to be by no means clear in his mind.

“If you had a free hand, Gardiner,” said he, “that would be one thing, but you haven’t.  I’ve had my eye on Blaines for a long time, and frankly I don’t think it is entitled to any assistance.  You have an inferior plant and a lot of inferior men; a small college governed by small ideas and ridden by a close corporation of small trustees—­”

“But heavens, man!” protested West, “your argument makes a perfect circle.  You won’t help Blaines because it’s poorly equipped, and Blaines is poorly equipped because the yellow-rich—­that’s you—­won’t help it.”

Stewart Byrd wiped his gold-rimmed glasses, laughing pleasantly.  He was the oldest of the four brothers, a man of authority at forty; and West watched him with a secret admiration, not untouched by a flicker of envy.