“You’ve given up the idiotic notion of wishing to be an author?”

I implied that he himself had convinced me of the futility of such a wish.  I listened to his next words as in a dream.

“I must confess to you, Hugh, that there are times when I fail to understand you.  I hope it is as you say, that you have arrived at a settled conviction as to your future, and that this is not another of those caprices to which you have been subject, nor a desire to shirk honest work.  Mr. Wood has made out a strong case for you, and I have therefore determined to give you a trial.  If you pass the examinations with credit, you may go to college, but if at any time you fail to make good progress, you come home, and go into business again.  Is that thoroughly understood?”

I said it was, and thanked him effusively....  I had escaped,—­the prison doors had flown open.  But it is written that every happiness has its sting; and my joy, intense though it was, had in it a core of remorse....

I went downstairs to my mother, who was sitting in the hall by the open door.

“Father says I may go!” I said.

She got up and took me in her arms.

“My dear, I am so glad, although we shall miss you dreadfully....  Hugh?”

“Yes, mother.”

“Oh, Hugh, I so want you to be a good man!”

Her cry was a little incoherent, but fraught with a meaning that came home to me, in spite of myself....

A while later I ran over to announce to the amazed Tom Peters that I was actually going to Harvard with him.  He stood in the half-lighted hallway, his hands in his pockets, blinking at me.

“Hugh, you’re a wonder!” he cried.  “How in Jehoshaphat did you work it?"...

I lay long awake that night thinking over the momentous change so soon to come into my life, wondering exultantly what Nancy Willett would say now.  I was not one, at any rate, to be despised or neglected.

VI.

The following September Tom Peters and I went East together.  In the early morning Boston broke on us like a Mecca as we rolled out of the old Albany station, joint lords of a “herdic.”  How sharply the smell of the salt-laden east wind and its penetrating coolness come back to me!  I seek in vain for words to express the exhilarating effect of that briny coolness on my imagination, and of the visions it summoned up of the newer, larger life into which I had marvellously been transported.  We alighted at the Parker House, full-fledged men of the world, and tried to act as though the breakfast of which we partook were merely an incident, not an Event; as though we were Seniors, and not freshmen, assuming an indifference to the beings by whom we were surrounded and who were breakfasting, too,—­although the nice-looking ones with fresh faces and trim clothes were all undoubtedly Olympians.  The better to proclaim our nonchalance, we seated ourselves on a lounge of the marble-paved lobby and smoked cigarettes.  This was liberty indeed!  At length we departed for Cambridge, in another herdic.