your class,” he said. “And not alone shelter, for you have given your love, yourself. This is treason to your class. Think not that you will escape being penalized.”
But it was before this that father returned one afternoon. Ernest was with me, and we could see that father was angry—philosophically angry. He was rarely really angry; but a certain measure of controlled anger he allowed himself. He called it a tonic. And we could see that he was tonic-angry when he entered the room.
“What do you think?” he demanded. “I had luncheon with Wilcox.”
Wilcox was the superannuated president of the university, whose withered mind was stored with generalizations that were young in 1870, and which he had since failed to revise.
“I was invited,” father announced. “I was sent for.”
He paused, and we waited.
“Oh, it was done very nicely, I’ll allow; but I was reprimanded. I! And by that old fossil!”
“I’ll wager I know what you were reprimanded for,” Ernest said.
“Not in three guesses,” father laughed.
“One guess will do,” Ernest retorted. “And it won’t be a guess. It will be a deduction. You were reprimanded for your private life.”
“The very thing!” father cried. “How did you guess?”
“I knew it was coming. I warned you before about it.”
“Yes, you did,” father meditated. “But I couldn’t believe it. At any rate, it is only so much more clinching evidence for my book.”