The professor from the State University was putting the case very fairly. There were no flaws--seemingly--to be picked in his logic. The State had been kind; the boys were obligated to good citizenship. But the coldness!--comfortlessness!--of it all. The open arms of the world!--how mocking in its abstractness. What did it mean? Did it mean that they--the men who uttered the phrase so easily--would be willing to give these boys aid, friendship when they came out into the world? What would they say, those boys whose ears were filled with high-sounding, non-committal phrases, if some man were to stand before them and say, “And so, fellows, when you get away from this place, and are ready to get your start in the world, just come around to my office and I'll help you get a job?” At thought of it there came from Philip Grayson a queer, partly audible laugh, which caused those nearest him to look his way in surprise. But he was all unconscious of their looks of inquiry, absorbed in the thoughts that crowded upon him. How far away the world--his kind of people--must seem to these boys of the State Reform School. The speeches they had heard, the training that had been given them, had taught them--unconsciously perhaps, but surely--to divide the world into two great classes: the lucky and the unlucky, those who made speeches and those who must listen, the so-called good and the so-called bad; perhaps--he smiled a little at his own cynicism--those who were caught and those who were not. There came to him these words of a poet of whom he used to be fond: In men whom men pronounce as ill, I find so much of goodness still; In men whom men pronounce divine, I find so much of sin and blot; I hesitate to draw the line Between the two, when God has not. When God has not! He turned and looked out at the sullen sky, returning--as most men do at times--to that conception of his childhood that somewhere beyond the clouds was God. God! Did God care for the boys of the State Reformatory? Was that poet of the western mountains right when he said that God was not a drawer of lines, but a seer of the good that was in the so-called bad, and of the bad in the so-called good, and a lover of them both? If that was God, it was not the God the boys of the reformatory had been taught to know. They had been told that God would forgive the wicked, but it had been made clear to them--if not in words, in implications--that it was they who were the wicked. And the so-called godly men, men of such exemplary character as had been chosen to address them that afternoon, had so much of the spirit of God that they, too, were willing to forgive, be tolerant, and--he looked out at the bending trees with a smile--disburse generalities about the open arms of the world.