The young man shook his head.  “Orders from home,” he said.  “Father insists on my coming home to him the moment the term closes.  I made that visit to Sam’s on my own responsibility and I got fits for doing it.  Dad seems to have a prejudice against the East.  He won’t come here himself and he doesn’t like to have me stay any longer than is absolutely necessary.  When I wrote him I was at South Harniss he telegraphed me to come home in a hurry.  He is Eastern born himself, lived somewhere this way when he was young, but he doesn’t talk about it and has more prejudices against Eastern ways and Eastern people than if he’d lived all his life in Carson City.  Won’t even come on to see me play football.  I doubt if he comes to Commencement next spring; and I graduate, too.”

“I wonder he permitted you to go to Harvard,” said Mary.

“He had to permit it.  I’ve always been for Harvard ever since I thought about college.  Dad was all for a Western university, but I sat back in the stirrups and pulled for Harvard and finally he gave in.  He generally gives in if I buck hard enough.  He’s a bully old Dad and we’re great pals, more like brothers than father and son.  The only point where we disagree is his confounded sectional prejudice.  He thinks the sun not only sets in the West but rises there.”

The girl learned that he intended entering the Harvard Medical School in the fall.

“I had to fight for that, too,” he said, with a laugh.  “I’ve always wanted to be a doctor but Dad wouldn’t give in for ever so long.  He is interested in mining properties there at home and it was his idea that I should come in with him when I finished school.  But I couldn’t see it.  I wanted to study medicine.  Dad says there are almost as many starving doctors as there are down-at-the-heel lawyers; if I go in with him, he says, I shall have what is practically a sure thing and a soft snap for the rest of my days.  That doesn’t suit me.  I want to work; I expect to.  I want to paddle my own canoe.  I may be the poorest M.D. that ever put up a sign, but I’m going to put that sign up just the same.  And if I starve I shan’t ask him or anyone else to feed me.”

He laughed again as he said it, but there was a determined ring in his voice and a square set to his chin which Mary noticed and liked.  He meant what he said, that was evident.

“I think a doctor’s profession is one of the noblest and finest in the world,” she said.

“Do you?  Good for you!  So do I. It doesn’t bring in the dollars as fast as some others, but it does seem a man’s job to me.  The big specialists make a lot of money too, but that isn’t exactly what I mean.  Some of the best men I’ve met were just country doctors, working night and day in all sorts of weather and getting paid or not, just as it happened.  That old Doctor Harley down in your town is one of that kind, I think.  I saw something of his work while I was there.”