Professor Stanton, not to my surprise, sent for me again.

Yet I was amazed at what he knew about me, amazed, too, to discover the extent of the school’s complicated system of pious espionage that checked up the least move of every student.

Stanton brought out a sheet of paper with dates and facts of my misbehaviour that could not be controverted....

“So we will have to ask you to withdraw from the school, unless you right-about-face ... otherwise, we have had enough of you ... in fact, if it had not been for your great promise—­your talents!—­”

I waved the compliment aside rather wearily.

“I think that if this school has had enough of me, I have had about enough of the school.”

I expressed, in plain terms, my opinion of their espionage system.

“Your omnipotent God must be hard put to it when He has to rely on the help of such sneakiness to keep His Book (and I couldn’t help laughing at the literary turn I gave to my denunciation) before the public!”

Stanton’s eyes flamed behind their glasses.

“Gregory, I shall have to ask you to leave the Hill as soon as you can get your things together,” he shouted.

“—­which can hardly be soon enough for me,” I replied.

“Come, my boy,” continued Stanton, as if ashamed at himself for his outburst, and putting his hand on my shoulder, “you’re a good sort of boy, after all ... you have so much in you, so much energy and power ... why don’t you put it to right uses?... after your father has made such sacrifices for you, I hate to see you run off to a ravelled edge like this.

“Even yet, if you’ll only promise to behave and preserve a proper dignity in the presence of the other students—­even yet we would be glad to have you stay and graduate ... and we might be able to procure you a scholarship at Harvard or Princeton or Yale or Brown.  Lang says you put yourself into the spirit of Homer like an old Greek, always doing more work than the requirements,—­and Dunn says, that you show him things in Vergil that he never saw before.”

Moved, I shook my head sadly.  I hated myself for liking these people.

“If you mean that I should be like other people ...  I just can’t ... it’s neither pose nor affectation.” (He had intimated that some of the professors alleged that as the core of the trouble.) “I guess I don’t belong here ... yes, it would be better for me to go away!”

* * * * *

That night, unobserved, I stole into the chapel that stood on the Crest of the hill, against the infinite stars.

I spent nearly all the night in the chapel, alone.  The place was full of things.  I felt there all the gods that ever were worshipped ... and all the great spirits of mankind.  And I perceived fully how silly, weak, grotesque, and vain I was; and yet, how big and wonderful, it would be to swim counter, as I meant, to the huge, swollen, successful currents of the commercial, bourgeois practicality of present-day America.