* * * * *

A week from then I left.

I went up to Mrs. Tighe’s room to say good-bye.  Awkwardly and with the bearlike roughness of excessive timidity I put my arms about her, drew her to me tentatively.

“Be careful, poet dear, or you’ll hurt me,” she warned, giving me a look of fondness.  Her left arm was in a sling.  She had fallen on the steps a few days before and had broken a small bone in the wrist.  “My sweet poet!”

The bandaged arm being in the way, I put my head down in her lap again, as she sat there on the edge of the great, white bed.

She leaned over, turned my face up with her free hand, kissed me full in the mouth....

“My sweet poet,” she repeated, “good-bye!”

* * * * *

While at Mt.  Hebron I had chosen German as my modern language.  And it was a Professor Langworth’s grammar and exercise book that we used as a text-book.  Langworth, I learned from the title page, was professor of Germanic languages in Laurel University, at Laurel, Kansas.

And now I bethought me that it would be much better to go to college in Kansas than attend the University at Chicago, where, I felt, education was made an industry, just like pork-packing and the hundred other big concerns in that city.  Kansas would encourage individuality more, be less appallingly machine-like.

The great, roaring city bewildered me, and the buildings of the University of Chicago (for I got so far as to ask for the registrar’s office) overwhelmed me with their number.  And I fled.  With the exception of a few days I put in washing dishes in a restaurant there, I stayed no longer, but freighted it southwest to Kansas City ... from whence I rode a freight further to Laurel.

* * * * *

In the evening twilight I climbed out of a box car in the railroad yards at Laurel....

I enquired my way to the university.

“Up on the hill.”

I veered off from the main street of the town ... a length of marching telegraph poles and flat-roofed Western houses.  I struck across lots in the cold and dark.  I floundered through half-hardened puddles of mud, over vacant lots that afterward seemed to have been conjured up for my impediment by some devil of piquaresque romance....

The hill, the very top of it, I had laboriously attained.  On all sides the college buildings gloomed in dusky whiteness of architecture.

One of them was lit inside with the mellow glow of electric lights.  As I stepped into the vestibule timidly, to enquire my way to Professor Langworth’s house (for it was his I decided to seek out first), a group of fragrant, white-clad girls herded together in astonished tittering when they saw me.  And I surely looked the tramp, dusty and soiled from my long ride.

I asked them the direction to Langworth’s house, but they ignored me, and scattered.  Turning in confusion, I ran into a man-student bodily ... excused myself ... the girls, standing further off, tittered again.