s ashamed at the ignorance of my father, but by the time I
was twenty-one I was amazed to discover how much the old man had learned
in four short years!' Confound it, James, you don't yet realize that
there are a lot of things in life that you can't even know about until
you've lived through them. You're blind here, even though your life has
been a solid case of encounter with unexpected experiences, one after the
other as you grew. Oh, you're smart enough to know that you've got to top
the next hill as soon as you've climbed this one, but you're not smart
enough to realize that the next hill merely hides the one beyond, and
that there are still higher hills beyond that stretching to the end of
the road for you--and that when you've finally reached the end of your
own road there will be more distant hills to climb for the folks that
follow you.

"You've a fine education, and it's helped you tremendously. But you've
loused up your own life and the life of Martha Bagley. You two are a pair
of outcasts, and you'll be outcasts until about ten years from now when
your body will have caught up with your mind so that you can join your
contemporaries without being regarded as a pair of intellectual freaks."

"And what should I have done?" demanded James Holden angrily.

"That's just it, again. You do not now realize that there isn't anything
you could have done, nor is there anything you can do now. That's why I'm
taking over and I'm going to do it for you."

"Yes?"

"Yes!" snapped Judge Carter. "We'll let them have their courses in baton
twirling and social grace and civic improvement and etiquette--and at the
same time we'll give them history and mathematics and spelling and
graduate them from 'high' school at the age of twelve or fourteen,
introduce an intermediary school for languages and customs of other
countries and in universal law and international affairs and economics,
where our bookkeepers will learn science and scientists will understand
commercial law; our lawyers will know business and our businessmen will
be taught politics. After that we'll start them in college and run them
as high as they can go, and our doctors will no longer go sour from the
moment they leave school at thirty-five to hang out their shingle.

"As for you, James Holden, you and Martha Bagley will attend this
preparatory school as soon as we can set it up. There will be no more of
this argument about being as competent as an adult, becaus