“Doesn’t get you anywhere!” Selina’s tone was cool and even. Then, as the boy’s gaze did not meet hers: “Why, Dirk DeJong, Mattie Schwengauer is one of my reasons for sending you to a university. She’s what I call part of a university education. Just talking to her is learning something valuable. I don’t mean that you wouldn’t naturally prefer pretty young girls of your own age to go around with, and all. It would be queer if you didn’t. But this Mattie—why, she’s life. Do you remember that story of when she washed dishes in the kosher restaurant over on Twelfth Street and the proprietor used to rent out dishes and cutlery for Irish and Italian neighbourhood weddings where they had pork and goodness knows what all, and then use them next day in the restaurant again for the kosher customers?” Yes, Dirk remembered. Selina wrote Mattie, inviting her to the farm for Thanksgiving, and Mattie answered gratefully, declining. “I shall always remember you,” she wrote in that letter, “with love.” XIV Throughout Dirk’s Freshman year there were, for him, no heartening, informal, mellow talks before the wood-fire in the book-lined study of some professor whose wisdom was such a mixture of classic lore and modernism as to be an inspiration to his listeners. Midwest professors delivered their lectures in the classroom as they had been delivering them in the past ten or twenty years and as they would deliver them until death or a trustees’ meeting should remove them. The younger professors and instructors in natty gray suits and bright-coloured ties made a point of being unpedantic in the classroom and rather overdid it. They posed as being one of the fellows; would dashingly use a bit of slang to create a laugh from the boys and an adoring titter from the girls. Dirk somehow preferred the pedants to these. When these had to give an informal talk to the men before some university event they would start by saying, “Now listen, fellahs——” At the dances they were not above “rushing” the pretty co-eds.