“The President,” said Guthrie. “He holds his authority, however, from omnipotent Regents who can kick _him_ out—and frequently do.” That idea seemed rather pleasant to Guthrie. He smiled at it. “Why don’t you elect your own Regents and your own President—as Americans should?” asked Vida. “Why not insist that you shall be removable only by vote of your own colleagues? It’s absurd that a body of men as highly trained as a university faculty should not be self-governing.” “Yes, yes,” said Guthrie, “it is absurd. But here’s the existing system. What force is capable of transforming it?” “Organization,” said Vida, fresh from her button-cutters. “How many college teachers are there?” “Twenty-eight thousand,” said Guthrie. “Five thousand of ‘em women.” “But not five thousand of ’em men,” said Kenton Clark with a malicious chuckle. “They would be—with power,” said Vida. “I’d like to see it. The scholar would become a real force. It would be good to see thinking married again to doing, after the long divorce that has made them both sterile.” “There’s plenty of powder lying loose in discontented faculties,” Clark mused. “If only it could be rammed together and—touched with flame.” “Be the flame!” cried Vida. “A movement nation-wide may sweep out from John Guthrie and Kenton Clark.” Mrs. Guthrie pushed back her chair energetically, indicating that dinner was over. “Shall we go to the parlor?” she said. The three were so absorbed they did not hear. “Could we get a dozen men who’d hold together, Guthrie?” said Clark. “There are more than a dozen—twice that many—radicals in the faculty,” said Guthrie. “Whether they’d hold together——” “The Regents would have to think a bit before they fired a dozen men,” said Clark. He and Guthrie tried to see how to get the substance of the labor union idea without taking the name or the form. Vida told them the name was immaterial, the form essential. “You can’t get the strength of organization without organizing,” she said. Their instinct was against applying the working-class method to their profession. They raised the difficulty of equal pay for unequal work and mulled around over it till Vida gave them up. “You’ve been too carefully selected,” she said. “It’s temperamental. No real revolutionist becomes a college professor.” That set Clark and Guthrie persuading her of the advantages of the union—which college teachers certainly had the brains to perceive. “Yes,” said Vida, “but the will to achieve them, the spirit to fight for them, the power to make sacrifices for them?” Mrs. Guthrie sprang up. The movement, which drew all eyes to her, placed her unintentionally near Vida. “I don’t want Harold and Lucy sacrificed!” she cried. Her primeval cry made Vida’s hand leap out and press hers for an instant. Mrs. Guthrie wavered between hostility to Vida’s doctrines and the attraction of that wave of sympathy which swept her like a physical force.