ion he couldn't have had better advantages. I was told that the
graduates of this school entered college with a higher average than
the graduates of most of the big preparatory schools. Certainly they
had just as good instruction and if anything better discipline. There
was more competition here and a real competition. Many of the pupils
were foreign born and a much larger per cent of them children of
foreign born. Their parents had been over here long enough to realize
what an advantage an education was and the children went at their work
with the feeling that their future depended upon their application
here.

The boy's associates might have been more carefully selected at some
fashionable school but I was already beginning to realize that
selected associates aren't always select associates and that even if
they are this is more of a disadvantage than an advantage. The fact
that the boy's fellows were all of a kind was what had disturbed me
even in the little suburban grammar school. For that matter I can see
now that even for Ruth and me this sameness was a handicap for both us
and our neighbors. There was no clash. There was a dead level. I don't
believe that's good for either boys or men or for women.

Supposing this open door policy did admit a few worthless youngsters
into the school and supposing again that the private school didn't
admit such of a different order (which I very much doubt)--along with
these Dick was going to find here the men--the past had proved this
and the present was proving it--who eventually would become our
statesmen, our progressive business men, our lawyers and doctors--if
not our conservative bankers. For one graduate of such a school as my
former surroundings had made me think essential for the boy, I could
count now a dozen graduates of this very high school who were
distinguishing themselves in the city. The boy was going to meet here
the same spirit I was getting in touch with among my emigrant
friends--a zeal for life, a belief in the possibilities of life, an
optimistic determination to use these possibilities, which somehow the
blue-blooded Americans were losing. It seemed to me that life was
getting stale for the fourth and fifth generation. I tried to make the
boy see this point of view. I went back again with him to the pioneer
idea.

"Dick," I said in substance, "your great-great-grandfather pulled up
stakes and came over to this country when there was nothing here but
t