have I tried to carry on. But it is very hard--carrying
on a dream.

FEJEVARY: Well, I'm trying to make it easier.

HOLDEN: Make it easier by destroying the dream?

FEJEVARY: Not at all. What I want is scope for dreams.

HOLDEN: Are you sure we'd have the dreams after we've paid this price
for the scope?

FEJEVARY: Now let's not get rhetorical with one another.

HOLDEN: Mr Fejevary, you have got to let me be as honest with you as you
say you are being with me. You have got to let me say what I feel.

FEJEVARY: Certainly. That's why I wanted this talk with you.

HOLDEN: You say you have made sacrifices for Morton College. So have I.

FEJEVARY: How well I know that.

HOLDEN: You don't know all of it. I'm not sure you understand any of it.

FEJEVARY: (_charmingly_) Oh, I think you're hard on me.

HOLDEN: I spoke of the tenth anniversary. I was a young man then, just
home from Athens, (_pulled back into an old feeling_) I don't know why I
felt I had to go to Greece. I knew then that I was going to teach
something within sociology, and I didn't want anything I felt about
beauty to be left out of what I formulated about society. The Greeks--

FEJEVARY: (_as_ HOLDEN _has paused before what he sees_) I remember you
told me the Greeks were the passion of your student days.

HOLDEN: Not so much because they created beauty, but because they were
able to let beauty flow into their lives--to create themselves in
beauty. So as a romantic young man (_smiles_), it seemed if I could go
where they had been--what I had felt might take form. Anyway, I had a
wonderful time there. Oh, what wouldn't I give to have again that
feeling of life's infinite possibilities!

FEJEVARY: (_nodding_) A youthful feeling.

HOLDEN: (_softly_) I like youth. Well, I was just back, visiting my
sister here, at the time of the tenth anniversary. I had a chance then
to go to Harvard as instructor. A good chance, for I would have been
under a man who liked me. But that afternoon I heard your father speak
about books. I talked with Silas Morton. I found myself telling him
about Greece. No one had ever felt it as he felt it. It seemed to become
of the very bone of him.

FEJEVARY: (_affectionately_) I know how he used to do.

HOLDEN: He put his hands on my shoulders. He said, 'Young man, don't go
away. We need you here. Give us this great thing you've got!' And so I
stayed, for I felt that here was soil in which I could grow, and that
one's whol