desires were more passionate than mine. I worried through the mechanical,
deadening routine of the Tech. somehow, and finally got courage enough to
tell him that I could not accept Wabash quite yet. I had the audacity to
propose two years abroad. We compromised on one, but I understood that I
must not finally disappoint him. He cared so much that it would have been
wicked. A few people in this world have positive and masterful
convictions. An explosion or insanity comes if their wills smoulder in
ineffectual silence. Most of us have no more than inclinations. It seems
wise and best that those of mere inclinations should waive their
prejudices in favor of those who feel intensely. So much for the great
questions of individuality and personality that set the modern world
a-shrieking. This is a commonplace solution of the great family problem
Turgenieff propounded in "Fathers and Sons." Perchance you have heard of
Turgenieff?

So I prepared to follow my father's will, for I loved him exceedingly. His
life had not been happy, and his nature, as I have said, was a more
exacting one than mine. The price of submission, however, was not plain to
me until I was launched that year in Paris in a strange, cosmopolitan
world. I was supposed to attend courses at the Ecole Polytechnique, but I
became mad with the longings that are wafted about Europe from capital to
capital. I went to Italy--to Venice and Florence and Rome--to Athens and
Constantinople and Vienna. In a word, I unfitted myself for Wabash as
completely as I could, and troubled my spirit with vain attempts after art
and feeling.

You women do not know the intoxication of five-and-twenty--a few hundred
francs in one's pockets, the centuries behind, creation ahead. You do not
know what it is to hunger after the power of understanding and the power
of expression; to see the world as divine one minute and a mechanic hell