“That brings it right round to my point again,” exclaimed Hewitt. “Of course every man wants to ‘work out his own salvation,’ as you put it; but at Harvard I don’t think it’s every man who is given the opportunity to. He doesn’t know that before he comes, he doesn’t find it out for some time after he gets here; but it’s true, and it’s precisely what I want you to tell me about--to explain.” There was but a faint note of triumph in Hewitt’s voice; he realised that he had Curtiss in a corner, but he had not been conscious of manœuvring to get him there. “Tell me this: Do you think that Harvard--and by that I don’t mean the Officers of Instruction and Government, they’re the least of it--do you think that Harvard is fair, and do you think that it is American?” There was something so general, so meaningless, so senatorial in the application of Hewitt’s final word that Curtiss was surprised into a shout of laughter. “Whether it’s fair or not, depends on who’s telling you about it,” he said gravely enough; “but there’s no question as to its nationality,” he laughed again; “of course it’s American, horribly American, deliciously American!” Hewitt puckered his forehead and waited for more; he did not in the least understand. “When I say American, I don’t mean what you mean; because--pardon me for saying it--you don’t mean anything.” Curtiss found it suddenly easy to rattle on as he had been doing earlier in the evening; his laugh had cleared the atmosphere. “My dear fellow,” he said, “Harvard University possesses its labouring class, its middle class, and its aristocracy, as sharply, as inevitably, as--as--” he was about to draw a rather over-emphatic comparison between Harvard and the social orders of Sparta in the days of Lycurgus, when Hewitt, still puzzled, broke in with,-- “But if that’s the case, it isn’t American at all--you contradict yourself in the same breath.”