“That’s all right, Marty,” J.W. rejoined.  “I don’t need much convincing on that score.  I can see the good times too; you know I’d try for all the athletics I could get into, and I guess I could keep my end up socially.  But is all that worth my time for the next four years, studying subjects that would be no earthly good to me in business, in making a living, I mean?  The other boys in hardware stores would have four years the start of me.”

“But don’t you remember, J.W., what our commencement speaker said on that very point?  He told us we had to be men and women first, no matter what occupations we got into.  And he bore down hard on how it was a good deal bigger business to make a life than to make a living.  In these days the most dangerous people, to themselves and to all of us, are the uneducated people.”

“Yes, I remember,” J.W. admitted. “’Cultural and social values of education,’ he called that, didn’t he?  And that’s what I’m not sure of.  It seems pretty foggy to me.  But, old man, you’re going, that’s settled, and maybe I’ll just let dad send me to keep you company, if I can’t find any better reason.”

“That’s all very well for you to say, J.W.,” Marty retorted, with the least little touch of resentment in his tone.  “You’ll let your dad send you.  My dad can’t send me, though he’ll do all he’s able to do, and how I can earn enough, to get through is more than I can see from here.”

But J.W. asserted, confidently:  “There’s a way, just the same, and I think I know how to find out about it.  I haven’t been a second assistant deputy secretary in the Sunday school for nothing.  You reminded me of the commencement address; I’ll ask you if you remember Children’s Day?  It came the very next Sunday.”

“Yes, I remember it; but what of it?”

“Well, my boy, we took up a collection for you!”

“We did?  Not much we did, and anyway, do you think I’d accept that sort of help?  I’m not looking for charity, yet,” and Marty showed the hurt he felt.

“Steady, Martin Luther!  I wouldn’t want you to get that collection anyway; it wasn’t near big enough.  But don’t you know that every Children’s Day collection in the whole church goes to the Board of Education, and that it has become a big fund, never to be given away but always to be loaned to students getting ready to be preachers and such?  It’s no charity; it’s the same broad-minded business you want me to go to college for.  I can see that much without getting any nearer to college than the Delafield First Church Sunday School.  You borrow the money, just as if you stepped up to a bank window, and you agree to pay it back as soon as you can after you graduate.  Then it goes into the Fund again, and some other boy or girl borrows it, and so on.  More than twenty-five thousand students have borrowed from this fund.  About fifteen hundred of ’em got loans last year.  Ask the preacher if I’m not giving you this straight.”