Part 28 (1/2)

”If I didn't bring that, I should feel so humiliated before him-”

He affected an ignorance which was not a fact.

”Who _is_ this paragon, anyhow?”

”I thought mother might have told you. It's Mr. Ayling.”

”Oh, that teacher fellow!”

”He's more than that, dad. He's a professor in one of our greatest universities. He's a writer beginning to be recognized as having ideas.

He has a position of his own-”

”Yes; but only an intellectual one.”

She raised her eyebrows.

”'Only'?”

He straightened himself and prepared for business.

”Look here, Edith, don't kid yourself. An intellectual position in this country is no position at all. The American people have no use for the intellectual, and they've made that plain.”

She could hardly express her amazement.

”Why, dad! There's no country in the world where people go in more for education, where there are more men who go to colleges-”

”Yes-to fit them for making money, not to turn them into highbrows. You must have a spade to dig a garden, but it's the garden you're proud of, not the spade.”

”And the very President of the country-”

”Is what you call an intellectual man; but that's a bit of chance. He's not President because he was a college professor, but because he was a politician. If he hadn't been a politician-something that the country values-he'd still be rotting in some two-by-three university. Listen, Edith!” He emphasized his point by the movement of his forefinger.

”We've a rule in business which is the test of everything. So long as you stick to it you can't go wrong in your estimates. _The value of a thing is as much money as it will bring._ You know the value of the intellectual in American eyes the minute you think of what the American people is willing to pay for it. You say your intellectual man has a position of his own. Well, you can see how big the position is by what he earns. He doesn't earn enough decently to support a wife, and so long as the American people have anything to say to it, he never will. You can box the whole compa.s.s of fellows who live by their wits-teachers, writers, journalists, artists, musicians, clergymen, and the whole tribe of them. We don't want them in this country, except as you want a spade and a hoe in your tool-house. When they try to get in, we starve them out; and, Collingham as you are, once you've married this fellow you'll go with your gang.” He pushed back his chair and rose. ”That's all I've got to say. Think it over.” As he pa.s.sed out through the French window to the terrace beyond he snapped his fingers. ”Dauphin, come along!”

But, perhaps for the first time in his life, Dauphin didn't immediately follow him. Instead, he went first to Edith, laying his long nozzle in her lap.

For five or ten minutes, as Collingham smoked his morning cigar while visiting the stables, the garage, and the kitchen garden, the natural man tried to raise his voice.

”Why didn't you say, 'Marry your man, Edith, my child, and I'll give you ten thousand a year?' Poor little girl,” this first Collingham went on, ”she's so frank and true and high spirited! You've made her unhappy when you could so easily have made her glad.”

”You said what any other American father in your position would have said,” the pupil of Bickley and Junia argued, on the other side. ”True, you've made her unhappy, but young people often have to be made unhappy in order that the foolish dictates of the heart may be repressed. There are millions of people all over the world whose lives would have been spoiled if such early emotional impulses hadn't been thwarted.”

And, after all, it was true that the intellectual was not respected. The public pretended that it was, but when it came to the test of social and financial reward-the only rewards there were-the pretense was apparent.

There were no intellectual people at Marillo Park; there were none whom he, Collingham, knew in business. There were men with brains; but to distinguish them from the intellectual they were described as brainy.

Edith as the wife of an intellectual man would be self-destroyed; and it was his duty as her father to stop, if he could, that self-destruction.

By the time he had reached the point in his morning ritual which brought him to Junia's bedside, he was standardized again, even though it was with a bleeding heart. He could more easily suffer a bleeding heart than he could the fear of not being an efficient man of business.

”What use have you had for the twenty-five thousand I've paid in your account?” he asked, before he kissed her good-by.