For just an instant the Youngish Girl gazed a bit skeptically at the
Traveling Salesman's general rotund air of prosperity.

"You don't look--exactly like a man who's never had enough," she said
smilingly.

"Food?" said the Traveling Salesman. "Oh, shucks! It wasn't food I was
thinking of. It was education. Oh, of course," he added
conscientiously, "of course, when the crops weren't either too heavy
or too blooming light, Pa usually managed some way or other to get
Daniel and me to school. And schooling was just nuts to me, and not a
single nut so hard or so green that I wouldn't have chawed and bitten
my way clear into it. But Daniel--Daniel somehow couldn't seem to see
just how to enter a mushy Bartlett pear without a knife or a fork--in
some other person's fingers. He was all right, you know--but he just
couldn't seem to find his own way alone into anything. So when the
time came--" the grin on the Traveling Salesman's mouth grew just a
little bit wry at one corner--"and so when the time came--it was an
awful nice, sweet-smelling June night, I remember, and I'd come home
early--I walked into the kitchen as nice as pie, where Pa was sitting
dozing in the cat's rocking-chair, in his gray stocking feet, and I
threw down before him my full year's school report. It was pink, I
remember, which was supposed to be the rosy color of success in our
school; and I says: 'Pa! There's my report! And Pa,' I says, as bold
and stuck-up as a brass weathercock on a new church, 'Pa! Teacher says
that one of your boys has got to go to college!' And I was grinning
all the while, I remember, worse than any Chessy cat.

"And Pa he took my report in both his horny old hands and he spelt it