The woman sitting beside him in a low rocking chair
began trying to tell him of something that had been
in her mind. Her heart jumped and she talked
slowly, pausing between sentences to conceal the trembling
of her voice. “Would it help you in what
you want to do if you could quit at the warehouse
and spend your days in study?” she asked.
McGregor looked at her and nodded his head absent-mindedly.
He thought of the nights in his room when the hard
heavy work of the day in the warehouse seemed to have
benumbed his brain.
“Besides the business here I have seventeen
hundred dollars in the savings bank,” said Edith,
turning aside to conceal the eager hopeful look in
her eyes. “I want to invest it. I do
not want it lying there doing nothing. I want
you to take it and make a lawyer of yourself.”
Edith sat rigid in her chair waiting for his answer.
She felt that she had put him to a test. In her
mind was a new hope. “If he takes it he
will not be walking out at the door some night and
never coming back.”
McGregor tried to think. He had not tried to
explain to her his new notion of life and did not
know how to begin.
“After all why not stick to my plan and be a
lawyer?” he asked himself. “That
might open the door. I’ll do that,”
he said aloud to the woman. “Both you and
mother have talked of it so I’ll give it a trial.
Yes, I’ll take the money.”
Again he looked at her as she sat before him flushed
and eager and was touched by her devotion as he had
been touched by the devotion of the undertaker’s
daughter in Coal Creek. “I don’t mind
being under obligations to you,” he said; “I
don’t know any one else I would take it from.”
In the street later the troubled man walked about
trying to make new plans for the accomplishment of
his purpose. He was annoyed by what he thought
to be the dulness of his own brain and he thrust his
fist up into the air to look at it in the lamplight.
“I’ll get ready to use that intelligently,”
he thought; “a man wants trained brains backed
up by a big fist in the struggle I’m going into.”
It was then that the man from Ohio walked past with
his hands in his pockets and attracted his attention.
To McGregor’s nostrils came the odour of rich
fragrant tobacco. He turned and stood staring
at the intruder on his thoughts. “That’s
what I am going to fight,” he growled; “the
comfortable well-to-do acceptance of a disorderly world,
the smug men who see nothing wrong with a world like
this. I would like to frighten them so that they
throw their cigars away and run about like ants when
you kick over ant hills in the field.”
McGregor began to attend some classes at Chicago University
and walked about among the massive buildings, erected
for the most part through the bounty of one of his
country’s leading business men, wondering why
the great centre of learning seemed so little a part
of the city. To him the University seemed something
entirely apart, not in tune with its surrounding.
It was like an expensive ornament worn on the soiled
hand of a street urchin. He did not stay there
long.
