right, I guess,” he added tolerantly, “but she hasn’t got much sense.” He unfitted the cylinders, squinting at them.
“That’s where she changes gear, is it?” Fairchild leaned nearer again. “‘Yes, she’s a pretty nice sort of a kid. Kind of like a racehorse colt, you know. . . . So you’re going up to Yale. I used to want to go to Yale, myself, once. Only I had to go where I could. I guess there is a time in the life of every young American of the class that wants to go to college or accepts the inevitability of education, when he wants to go to Yale or Harvard. Maybe that’s the value of Yale and Harvard to our American life: a kind of illusion of an intellectual nirvana that makes the ones that can’t go there work like hell where they do go, so as not to show up so poorly alongside of the ones that can go there.
“Still, ninety out of a hundred Yale and Harvard turn out are reasonably bearable to live with, if they ain’t anything else. And that’s something to be said for any manufactory, I guess. But Id like to have gone there. . . .” The nephew was not listening particularly. He shaved and trimmed solicitously at his cylinder. Fairchild said:
“It was a kind of funny college I went to. A denominational college, you know, where they turned out preachers. I was working in a mowing machinery factory in Indiana, and the owner of the factory was a trustee of this college. He was a sanctimonious old fellow with a beard like a goat, and every year he offered a half scholarship to be competed for by young men working for him. You won it, you know, and he found you a job near the college to pay your board, but not enough to do anything else—to keep you from fleshly temptations, you know—and he had a monthly report on your progress sent to him. And I won it, that year.
“It was just for one year, so I tried to take everything I could. I had about six or seven lectures a day, besides the
