"Either the University of Chicago, or further west."
"I can give you commutation as far as Chicago."
"I cannot accept it."
"You must, Razorre."
* * * * *
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....