“The fees are two hundred and eighty-five dollars in the Upper School.”

“Yes, I expected they would be high,” I said.

“Not at all.  They are the lowest in New York.  Smart private schools will charge five or six hundred dollars a year.”

Exhausted, humbled, I at last quitted the warmed Horace Mann ozone for the harsh and searching atmosphere of the street.  And I gazed up at the pile, and saw all its interiors again in my mind.  I had not grasped the half nor the quarter of what had been so willingly and modestly shown to me.  I had formed no theory as to the value of some of the best juvenile education in the Eastern States.  But I had learned one thing.  I knew the secret of the fine, proud bearing of young America.  A child is not a fool; a child is almost always uncannily shrewd.  And when it sees a splendid palace provided for it, when it sees money being showered upon hygienic devices for its comfort, even upon trifles for its distraction, when it sees brains all bent on discovering the best, nicest ways of dealing with its instincts, when it sees itself the center of a magnificent pageant, ritual, devotion, almost worship, it naturally lifts its chin, puts its shoulders back, steps out with a spring, and glances down confidently upon the whole world.  Who wouldn’t?

* * * * *

It was an exciting day for me when I paid a call next door to Horace Mann and visited Columbia University.  For this was my first visit of inspection to any university of any kind, either in the New World or in the Old.  As for an English university education, destiny had deprived me of its advantages and of its perils.  I could not haughtily compare Columbia with Oxford or Cambridge, because I had never set foot even in their towns.  I had no standards whatever of comparison.

I arose and went out to lunch on that morning, and left the lunch before anybody else and rushed in an automobile to Columbia; but football had already begun for the day in the campus costing two million dollars, and classes were over.  I saw five or more universities while I was in America, but I was not clever enough to catch one of them in the act of instruction.  What I did see was the formidable and magnificent machine, the apparatus of learning, supine in repose.

And if the spectacle was no more than a promise, it was a very dazzling promise.  No European with any imagination could regard Columbia as other than a miracle.  Nearly the whole of the gigantic affair appeared to have been brought into being, physically, in less than twenty years.  Building after building, device after device, was dated subsequent to 1893.  And to my mind that was just the point of the gigantic affair.  Universities in Europe are so old.  And there are universities in America which are venerable.  A graduate of the most venerable of them told me that Columbia was not “really” a university.  Well, it did seem unreal, though not in his sense; it seemed magic.  The graduate in question told me that a university could not be created by a stroke of the wand.  And yet there staring me in the face was the evidence that a university not merely could be created by a stroke of the wand, but had been. (I am aware of Columbia’s theoretic age and of her insistence on it.) The wand is a modern invention; to deny its effective creative faculty is absurd.