I grew
tired of the school teachers, drumming with their fingers on the desks and
looking out at the windows at men passing in the street. I wanted to get
out of there and into the streets myself."
Dropping his hands from her shoulders, he sat down in a chair and stared
into the fire, now blazing steadily. Steam began to rise from his trousers
legs. His mind, still working beyond his control, began to reconstruct an
old boyhood fancy, half his own, half John Telfer's, that had years before
come into his mind. It concerned a picture he and Telfer had made of the
ideal scholar. The picture had, as its central figure, a stoop-shouldered,
feeble old man stumbling along the street, muttering to himself and poking
in a gutter with a stick. The picture was a caricature of puttering old
Frank Huntley, superintendent of the Caxton schools.
Sitting before the fire in Mary Underwood's house, become, for the moment,
a boy, facing a boy's problems, Sam did not want to be such a man. He
wanted only that in scholarship which would help him to be the kind of man
he was bent on being, a man of the world doing the work of the world and
making money by his work. Things he had been unable to get expressed when
he was a boy and her friend, coming again into his mind, he felt that he
must here and now make it plain to Mary Underwood that the schools were
not giving him what he wanted.
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