Cartey serenely. "Not a breath of what he meant got to me, but what he said was that Ivan's schoolin' had put queer ideas in his head to be an anarchist or somethin' and he thought that maybe more schoolin' would drive out thim ideas and put in other ones yet. Hasn't it a foolish sound, now?" She appealed to J. M. for a sympathy she did not get.
"It sounds like the most interesting case I ever heard of," he cried, with a generous looseness of superlative new to him. "Is Ivan that tall, shy, sad-looking boy who goes with his father to work?"
"That's him. An' plays the fiddle fit to tear the heart out of your body, and reads big books till God knows what hour in the mornin'. His father, he says he don't know what to do with him.... There's a big, bad devil of a Polack down to the works that wants him to join the anarchists in the fall and go to"
J. M. rose to his feet and hurried down the porch toward the Petrofsky wing of the house, addressing himself to the tall, grave-faced figure in the doorway. "Oh, Mr. Petrofsky, may I have a few minutes talk with you about your son?" he said.
III
The registrar of Middletown College, being a newcomer, saw nothing unusual in the fact that the librarian came to his office on matriculation day to enroll as a freshman a shy, dark-eyed lad with a foreign name; but the president and older professors were petrified into speechlessness by the news that old J. M. had returned from parts unknown with a queer-looking boy, who called
