“Different from what?”

“You know mamma is in the Orthopedic Hospital, and in the Ragged Schools, and in the Infirmary, and I don’t know what all.”

“And wouldn’t you help them?”

“Of course, I would help.  But everybody does those things, the practical things, the charities; I mean to do things for the higher life.”

Mr. Mavick took his cigar from his mouth and looked puzzled.  “You want to build a cathedral?”

“No, I don’t mean that sort of higher life, I mean civilization, the things at the top.  I read an essay the other day that said it was easy to raise money for anything mechanical and practical in a school, but nobody wanted to give for anything ideal.”

“Quite right,” said her father; “the world is full of cranks.  You seem as vague as your essayist.”

“Don’t you remember, papa, when we were in Oxford how amused you were with the master, or professor, who grumbled because the college was full of students, and there wasn’t a single college for research?

“I asked McDonald afterwards what he meant; that is how I first got my idea, but I didn’t see exactly what it was until recently.  You’ve got to cultivate the high things—­that essay says—­the abstract, that which does not seem practically useful, or society will become low and material.”

“By George!” cried Mavick, with a burst of laughter, “you’ve got the lingo.  Go on, I want to see where you are going to light.”

“Well, I’ll tell you some more.  You know my tutor is English.  McDonald says she believes he is the most learned man in eighteenth-century literature living, and his dream is to write a history of it.  He is poor, and engaged all the time teaching, and McDonald says he will die, no doubt, and leave nothing of his investigations to the world.”

“And you want to endow him?”

“He is only one.  There is the tutor of history.  Teach, teach, teach, and no time or strength left for investigation.  You ought to hear him tell of the things just to be found out in American history.  You see what I mean?  It is plainer in the sciences.  The scholars who could really make investigations, and do something for the world, have to earn their living and have no time or means for experiments.  It seems foolish as I say it, but I do think, papa, there is something in it.”

“And what would you do?”

Evelyn saw that she was making no headway, and her ideas, exposed to so practical a man as her father, did seem rather ridiculous.  But she struck out boldly with the scheme that she had been evolving.

“I’d found Institutions of Research, where there should be no teaching, and students who had demonstrated that they had anything promising in them, in science, literature, languages, history, anything, should have the means and the opportunity to make investigations and do work.  See what a hard time inventors and men of genius have; it is pitiful.”