“You can imagine the look my father gave me when I made that proposition, for it knocked to splinters his special pet theories concerning education,” said Thurber. “He stormed about ‘self-made men,’ and quoted Lincoln and some others from the classic list of non-college men: pointed to himself and the huge industry he had created without the aid of a college education, and, in all, gave me to distinctly understand that a college education would spoil a good employer: that it was a waste of time, and that if I was set on going to college, why I could go on my own funds--which I did not have--and be hanged! Of course I was lazy, undecided and youthful: just at the age when all life is a perpetual sunny day. I wanted to come to college to sport around and imagined my doom sealed when father emphatically refused to fund me, but mother--say Priddy, what would the spoiled children of the rich do without generous-hearted mothers?--my mother privately funded me and sent me here and still maintains me, even against father’s orders, for he will not relent and imagines me to be the fool of fools in taking the course I did.” “The so-called ‘self-made men’ are usually very set men,” I replied. “Set?” muttered Thurber, “even a vice, tight locked, is loose by comparison with the prejudices my father has against a liberal education. Well, I came this way and started in to sport it and expected to be tutored through my courses by the narrowest passing marks. I spent most of my time either in the fraternity house chugging at a piano or sitting in my room with my feet perched on the table gazing into space. Then I got the--the glimpse, Priddy, and that changed it all.” “The glimpse, what was that?” “Well, I can’t exactly define it or locate where it first began, but I do recall that one day, in the classroom--it was in Sociology--the professor set me thinking on a line I had never considered before. I can’t tell what it was that he said explicitly, but he implicitly suggested to my mind that there are such things as dividends-not-of-money. Of course having been used to the other sort of dividends all my life, I was attracted to the idea that there were other dividends. I kept thinking about it and one thing led to another. The president spoke one day, in chapel, of the educated man’s duty to his generation. I linked that to ‘dividends-not-of-money’ and worked it out to my satisfaction that there was for me, the son of a wealthy manufacturer, a place of usefulness and service in the world.” “You had a call to the ministry, then, Thurber?” I demanded. “Gracious, no: not that!” he exclaimed, in a tone that implied I had proposed something too extravagant for fancy. “I a clergyman! I respect the cloth, Priddy, and I am glad that you are making it your profession, but really, that’s not my line. Perhaps I’m not cut out for it. I know I’m not.”