She stood nursing her stumpy hands under her apron, watching every mouthful he ate so eagerly that she might have been tasting it herself.  The train crew trooped in, shouting to her and asking what there was for dinner, and she ran about like an excited little hen, chuckling and cackling.  Claude wondered whether working-men were as nice as that to old women the world over.  He didn’t believe so.  He liked to think that such geniality was common only in what he broadly called “the West.”  He bought a big cigar, and strolled up and down the platform, enjoying the fresh air until the passenger whistled in.

After his freight train got under steam he did not open his books again, but sat looking out at the grey homesteads as they unrolled before him, with their stripped, dry cornfields, and the great ploughed stretches where the winter wheat was asleep.  A starry sprinkling of snow lay like hoar-frost along the crumbly ridges between the furrows.

Claude believed he knew almost every farm between Frankfort and Lincoln, he had made the journey so often, on fast trains and slow.  He went home for all the holidays, and had been again and again called back on various pretexts; when his mother was sick, when Ralph overturned the car and broke his shoulder, when his father was kicked by a vicious stallion.  It was not a Wheeler custom to employ a nurse; if any one in the household was ill, it was understood that some member of the family would act in that capacity.

Claude was reflecting upon the fact that he had never gone home before in such good spirits.  Two fortunate things had happened to him since he went over this road three months ago.

As soon as he reached Lincoln in September, he had matriculated at the State University for special work in European History.  The year before he had heard the head of the department lecture for some charity, and resolved that even if he were not allowed to change his college, he would manage to study under that man.  The course Claude selected was one upon which a student could put as much time as he chose.  It was based upon the reading of historical sources, and the Professor was notoriously greedy for full notebooks.  Claude’s were of the fullest.  He worked early and late at the University Library, often got his supper in town and went back to read until closing hour.  For the first time he was studying a subject which seemed to him vital, which had to do with events and ideas, instead of with lexicons and grammars.  How often he had wished for Ernest during the lectures!  He could see Ernest drinking them up, agreeing or dissenting in his independent way.  The class was very large, and the Professor spoke without notes,—­he talked rapidly, as if he were addressing his equals, with none of the coaxing persuasiveness to which Temple students were accustomed.  His lectures were condensed like a legal brief, but there was a kind of dry fervour in his voice, and when he occasionally interrupted his exposition with purely personal comment, it seemed valuable and important.