"I haven’t a bit of the scholastic temperament," he said, after having waited long enough to let me try to find an answer. "It’s just one of the many things I don’t understand. I wouldn’t deny that any bit of scholarship, however ’dry-as-dust,’ may be of some use. I don’t doubt that a good case of this kind could be made for the study of medieval literature. I don’t say it’s _absolutely_ useless. But _relatively_ it seems—well—uninteresting to me. It’s in the same class as astronomy. You could study the stars till you were black in the face and you wouldn’t find anything wrong with them, and if you did you couldn’t make it right. Astronomy has been of some practical use to us, at least it helps us regulate our watches. But how in the devil do you expect to wring any usefulness out of Anglo-Saxon? Don’t you want to be useful?" His scorn for my specialty ruffled my temper. "What would you suggest for me to do? Social-Settlement-ology?" I replied with elaborate irony. But if he caught the note of anger in my retort, he was too busy with his own ideas to pay any attention to it. He got off the table and paced up and down like a caged beast, as he always did when he was wrestling with a problem. In a moment he came back and sat down. "You don’t answer my question," he said sharply. "You can stand on your dignity and say I have no right to ask it. But that’s rot! I’m serious and I give you the credit of thinking you are. Now you propose to turn your back on the world and go into a sort of monastery. This job is just a beginning. You’re making your choice between men and books, between human thought that is alive and the kind that’s been preserved like mummies. Why? I ask. What is there in these old books which can compare in interest to the life about us. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more dramatic, more comic, more tragic, more beautiful. Even Shelley never wrote a lyric like some you can see with your own eyes, perhaps feel. I like to know what makes people do things. I’d like to know what makes you accept this offer. I assume that you want to be useful to your day and generation. What utility do you hope to serve in tabulating these old books, which nobody but a few savants will ever read?" I was entirely unprepared to answer his question. And I felt myself sink in his estimation. Why was I reaching out for the life of a bookworm with such eagerness? I understand now. I was a coward. I was still sore from the wounds of my childish endeavor to comprehend God. I was afraid of life. I was afraid of the little child sucking the apple core on Stanton Street. The life about me, of which Benson spoke so enthusiastically, seemed to me threatening. It evidently laid an obligation of warfare on the people who entered it actively. I wanted peace. Books seemed to me a sort of city of refuge.