yanked me out of college ’cause I flunked math and physics again even though I did fairly well in languages and literature and one or two other things. He says I’ve got to go to work in the insurance business or he’s going to wash his hands of me.”
“What makes you so restless—makes you kick against the traces all the time?” Mimi found herself taking delight in siding with Mr. Hunter against Carl.
“I don’t know,” Carl answered, a faint note of bafflement, almost of despair, creeping into his voice. “All my life I’ve been just what you called me a kicker. I’ve tried to conform—but all the time I find myself saying: ‘Is that so?’ when some greybeard starts to lecture me. And most of the things that everybody accepts as axiomatic, as truths never to be questioned, seem to me false and absolutely without value. In college I ran across a passage one day from Spinoza that fits it exactly where he says that ‘truths are the falsehoods grown hoary with age.’ ”
“You’re just pessimistic—you’ll settle down in time,” counselled Mimi, finding herself interested in spite of herself.
Carl picked up her words.
“Pessimistic! Settle down! I’ve heard those words with variations a thousand times! Why should I settle down? If I’d only work like a slave for ten or fifteen years, make some money, marry some respectable but dull girl who’d have a lot of babies and get fat in a few years, and then drop into a rut from which I’d never get out, then I’d meet the approval of all those tabbies over there as a ‘fine, upright, Christian young man’!” His last five words were filled with distaste for the respectability the community wished for him.
“I don’t want a lot of money,” he went on vehemently. “I want to see things and live things and—and—” He peered at Mimi, somewhat