w environment at all it was to fare far--to India
and China, the foreign mission field. My view had broadened. Gladys
Todd had her being in higher airs. She painted. Pastels of flowers and
plaques adorned with ideal heads covered the walls of the Todd parlor.
She wrote. Doctor Todd assured me, speaking without prejudice, that his
daughter's essay on "The Immortality of the Soul," which she had written
out of pure love of the labor, equalled, if it did not surpass, the best
work of the senior class. She sang. Perhaps I see her now in the same
wizard lights of distance that glorified the mountains in my boyhood, but
I always recall her as a charming old-fashioned picture, sitting at her
piano and babbling her little songs in French and German. Of the quality
of her French and German I had no means of judging, but that she could
use them at all was to me surpassingly enchanting.

So Gladys Todd had her part in completing the wreck of my worthy
ambition. What Boller had begun, she unconsciously finished. Yesterday
I had planned to make self-sacrifice the key-note of my life. To-day I
could not picture her contented to move in the narrow sphere of a Mrs.
Pound, cramping her talents in the little circle of the Sunday-school and
the Ladies' Aid. Her influence for good must be a subtler one than this.
To wield it, she must have her being in higher airs, in an atmosphere of
Colosseums, of Rembrandts, and Madonnas. Remember, she was no longer the
shy girl whom I had met on the first night of my university life. Then
she was only in her fifteenth year. I was a junior when she produced her
lauded essay on "The Immortality of the Soul," and it revealed to me the
profundity of her mind. To match her, I must sit many a night driving my
way through difficult pages of the classics, and often when my heart was
in some smoky den with a few choice spirits, my body bent over my table
and my brain wearied itself with abstruse equations.

If Gladys Todd unconsciously wrecked my early scheme of life, she
unconsciously spurred me to the hard task of learning. I flattered
myself that in the new calling which I had chosen I should be able to be
even a greater power for good than in the old. Having attained to
Boller's perfection, as I had abandoned Mr. Pound for him, I now
abandoned him for ex-Judge Bundy. As Harlansburg was far above
Malcolmville, so ex-Judge Bundy was above Mr. Pound. He was not the
creator of Harlansburg, b