Two outside events which deeply influenced him must be noted. During his Sophomore year his father died; and during his Senior year, Theodore became engaged to Miss Alice Hathaway Lee, daughter of George C. Lee, of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. CHAPTER II. BREAKING INTO POLITICS Roosevelt was a few months less than twenty-two years old when he graduated from Harvard. His career in college had wrought several important changes in him. First of all, his strength was confirmed. Although he still suffered occasionally from asthma, he was no longer handicapped. In business, or in pleasure, he did not need to consider his health. Next, he had come to some definite decision as to what he would do. His earlier dream of becoming a professor of natural history had faded away. With the inpouring of vigor into his constitution the ideal of an academic life, often sedentary in mind as well as in body, ceased to lure him. He craved activity, and this craving was bound to grow more urgent as he acquired more strength. Next, and this consideration must not be neglected, he was free to choose. His father's death left him the possessor of a sufficient fortune to live on comfortably without need of working to earn his bread and butter--the motive which determines most young men when they start in life. Finally, his father's example, reinforced by wholesome advice, quickened in Theodore his sense of obligation to the community. Having money, he must use it, not for mere personal gratification, but in ways which would benefit those who were deprived, or outcast, or bereft. But Theodore was too young and too energetic to be contented with the life of a philanthropist, no matter how noble and necessary its objects might be. He had already accepted Emerson's dictum: "He who feeds men, serves a few; He serves all who dares be true."