It seemed to us something too wonderful to believe.  I remember going back to that lunch-table, after Carl had telephoned me only the broadest details, wondering if it were the same world.  That Book—­we had dreamed of writing that book for so many years—­the material to be in it changed continually, but always the longing to write, and no time, no hopes of any chance to do it.  And the June-Bug coming, and more need for money—­hence more outside lectures than ever.  I have no love for the University of California when I think of that $1700. (I quote from an article that came out in New York:  “It is an astounding fact which his University must explain, that he, with his great abilities as teacher and leader, his wide travel and experience and training, received from the University in his last year of service there a salary of $1700 a year!  The West does not repay commercial genius like that.”) For days after Max’s offer we hardly knew we were on earth.  It was so very much the most wonderful thing that could have happened to us.  Our friends had long ago adopted the phrase “just Parker luck,” and here was an example if there ever was one.  “Parker luck” indeed it was!

This all meant, to get the fulness out of it, that Carl must make a trip of at least four months in the East.  At first he planned to return in the middle of it and then go back again; but somehow four months spent as we planned it out for him seemed so absolutely marvelous,—­an opportunity of a lifetime,—­that joy for him was greater in my soul than the dread of a separation.  It was different from any other parting we had ever had.  I was bound that I would not shed a single tear when I saw him off, even though it meant the longest time apart we had experienced.  Three nights before he left, being a bit blue about things, for all our fine talk, we prowled down our hillside and found our way to our first Charlie Chaplin film.  We laughed until we cried—­we really did.  So that night, seeing Carl off, we went over that Charlie Chaplin film in detail and let ourselves think and talk of nothing else.  We laughed all over again, and Carl went off laughing, and I waved good-bye laughing.  Bless that Charlie Chaplin film!

It would not take much imagination to realize what that trip meant to Carl—­and through him to me.  From the time he first felt the importance of the application of modern psychology to the study of economics, he became more and more intellectually isolated from his colleagues.  They had no interest in, no sympathy for, no understanding of, what he was driving at.  From May, when college closed, to October, when he left for the East, he read prodigiously.  He had a mind for assimilation—­he knew where to store every new piece of knowledge he acquired, and kept thereby an orderly brain.  He read more than a book a week:  everything he could lay hands on in psychology, anthropology, biology, philosophy, psycho-analysis—­every field which he felt