ave you ever," he inquired, lapsing a little into his lecture-room
manner, "seriously thought of literature as a career? Have you ever
thought of any career seriously?"

"I once wished to be a writer, sir," I replied tremulously, but refrained
from telling him of my father's opinion of the profession. Ambition--a
purer ambition than I had known for years--leaped within me at his words.
He, Alonzo Cheyne, had detected in me the Promethean fire!

I sat there until ten o'clock talking to the real Mr. Cheyne, a human Mr.
Cheyne unknown in the lecture-room. Nor had I suspected one in whom
cynicism and distrust of undergraduates (of my sort) seemed so ingrained,
of such idealism. He did not pour it out in preaching; delicately,
unobtrusively and on the whole rather humorously he managed to present to
me in a most disillusionizing light that conception of the university
held by me and my intimate associates. After I had left him I walked the
quiet streets to behold as through dissolving mists another Harvard, and
there trembled in my soul like the birth-struggle of a flame something of
the vision later to be immortalized by St. Gaudens, the spirit of Harvard
responding to the spirit of the Republic--to the call of Lincoln, who
voiced it. The place of that bronze at the corner of Boston Common was as
yet empty, but I have since stood before it to gaze in wonder at the
light shining in darkness on mute, uplifted faces, black faces! at
Harvard's son leading them on that the light might live and prevail.

I, too, longed for a Cause into which I might fling myself, in which I
might lose myself... I halted on the sidewalk to find myself staring from
the opposite side of the street at a familiar house, my old landlady's,
Mrs. Bolton's, and summoned up before me was the tired, smiling face of
Hermann Krebs. Was it because when he had once spoken so crudely of the
University I had seen the reflection of her spirit in his eyes? A light
still burned in the extension roof--Krebs's light; another shone dimly
through the ground glass of the front door. Obeying a sudden impulse, I
crossed the street.

Mrs. Bolton, in the sky-blue wrapper, and looking more forbidding than
ever, answered the bell. Life had taught her to be indifferent to
surprises, and it was I who became abruptly embarrassed.

"Oh, it's you, Mr. Paret," she said, as though I had been a frequent
caller. I had never once darkened her threshold since I had left her
house.