“It’s just because I do not want to stop being a living influence—— A man must grow or ossify. Yesterday a new world of thought, a new secret of living, a new sincerity, came to birth in my mind. You want me to kill it. That is not being a living influence. That is spiritual infanticide. It means my extinction as a free teacher. And deserting that organization I helped to form last night—that means dishonor!” “No,” said the President emphatically. “You cannot be expected to sacrifice your career and your family because you happened to be carried away in a dramatic moment worked up by a professional agitator. You’ll see that within a month. This means your salvation from some wild ideas and wilder conduct.” With an air of relaxing from strain the President dropped back easily in his chair. “That woman must be clever, Guthrie. Isn’t she?” “She’s more than clever,” said Guthrie. “She’s a brave and skilful fighter for a great cause—a thing I cannot be. I cannot even face what every married button-cutter faces when he goes on strike!” Partially realizing how low Guthrie was sinking in his own estimation, the President was not the man to let sympathy keep him from gaining his end. “Well, Guthrie,” he said, “I take it that chiefly on account of your children I may count on your withdrawing from the College Teachers’ Union.” He smiled. “I say nothing more about the sex-radicalism, for I feel sure you will yourself see the need of soft-pedalling that in the classroom and in public. I am heartily glad you are still going to be with us.” Guthrie went out of the President’s office like a man who has been drugged. With an instinct to hide from every eye, he sought the noonday solitude of his seminar room, let the door lock behind him, and at the head of the long green table sank into that chair they called the chair of English. There, in the hour of his degradation, he felt prophetically the ennui of the next twenty years—the dead thoughts he would there utter and reiterate—the bored young faces—— What had become of the interestingness of ideas? Where was that passion for the hard and glorious quest of the true truth within? Why had he been so fiercely bent on shaping new channels for his energy? He had no energy. His thwarted force flowed away from his will where it meant health and conquest into a morbid intensity of emotion—the road to melancholia. He stiffened up. There was one pain he must meet now. There was that desire to hide to overcome—a self-revelation harder than any he had ever thought to make. There was shame to endure. “I have to tell her,” he said. He rose and left his solitude, went down the deserted central walk, and over to the drab-colored hotel. He looked between the open double doors into the dining room. There were a dozen people. At the table by the window in the corner where he had sat with them two days before were Kenton Clark and Vida. They beckoned eagerly to Guthrie.