So Gladys Todd had her part in completing the wreck of my worthy
ambition. What Boller had begun, she unconsciously finished. Yesterday
I had planned to make self-sacrifice the key-note of my life. To-day I
could not picture her contented to move in the narrow sphere of a Mrs.
Pound, cramping her talents in the little circle of the Sunday-school and
the Ladies' Aid. Her influence for good must be a subtler one than this.
To wield it, she must have her being in higher airs, in an atmosphere of
Colosseums, of Rembrandts, and Madonnas. Remember, she was no longer the
shy girl whom I had met on the first night of my university life. Then
she was only in her fifteenth year. I was a junior when she produced her
lauded essay on "The Immortality of the Soul," and it revealed to me the
profundity of her mind. To match her, I must sit many a night driving my
way through difficult pages of the classics, and often when my heart was
in some smoky den with a few choice spirits, my body bent over my table
and my brain wearied itself with abstruse equations.
If Gladys Todd unconsciously wrecked my early scheme of life, she
unconsciously spurred me to the hard task of learning. I flattered
myself that in the new calling which I had chosen I should be able to be
even a greater power for good than in the old. Having attained to
Boller's perfection, as I had abandoned Mr. Pound for him, I now
abandoned him for ex-Judge Bundy. As Harlansburg was far above
Malcolmville, so ex-Judge Bundy was above Mr. Pound. He was not the
creator of Harlansburg, but he was its providence. He owned the bank and
the nail works, he was a patron of its churches, the leading figure at
the bar, and a man of wonderful eloquence. Every year he delivered the
graduation address at the university, and mentally I modelled my future
appearance on the rostrum from his benign demeanor, his forceful
gestures, his rolling periods. Yet deep as was my admiration, he held
views on which I differed with him. I felt that I had gone deeper than
he into the logic of things. To him, for example, the high tariff was
the source of all good, of life, health, food, clothes, and even morals.
My view was broader. I brushed aside the beneficent local effect of any
system and went on to study its relation to all mankind. He was prone to
forget mankind, and yet his faults were those of his generation and he
remained a heroic figure in my eyes, and it seemed to me that in setting
myself to reach the mark he had made I was aiming very high indeed.
Perhaps I should have gone on, striving to attain to the Bundian
perfection had not the ex-judge himself been the instrument by which I
was awakened and shaken out of my self-complacence. Among the
benefactions which had brought him such high esteem in our college
community was "the Richardson Bundy course of lectures on the activities
of life." He paid for the services of orators whom Doctor Todd delighted
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