“I should say it had. I tell you I believe I understand, now, the tremendous suggestion that lies behind the college emphasis that its students stand in their businesses and interests against mere commercialism and flood them with intelligent, moral service. Besides, think what significance lies in my studies now: the whole course seems bent to broaden me towards the intelligent, economical use of human beings: psychology will give me trained insight, a course or two in physiology helps me to understand the limits of workingmen’s endurance and wide reading in literature will aid me to intelligently work out a policy of self-culture in the workingmen’s libraries I shall form. Oh, I have come to realize that a business education is a thousand times more than learning bookkeeping, the names of the tools, and a little mathematics from which to compute wages. It demands, in my estimation, the broadest college culture and I mean to secure it.” “Just the antithesis of your father’s theory,” I suggested. “Yes, and think, too, how much he has lost by it. You would understand how enthusiastic I am about it, Priddy, if you could have one glimpse of the people and tenements around father’s mill. I feel that right there is my call.” “I know something about the waste, the riot and the ruin that have followed in the wake of narrow-minded, selfish, uncultured and unsympathetic manufacturers, Thurber. If the college only manages to send out a hundred thousand graduates filled like you with this spirit of humane statesmanship, what a revolution would take place in labor conditions!” “It would be the front door of God’s kingdom, Priddy,” affirmed Thurber, “sure enough!” Throughout that year, from the seriousness with which Thurber asked questions in his classes, from the eagerness with which he was ready to talk about welfare work, from the diligence with which he fastened himself to the library alcoves marked: Economics and Sociology, and from the pervading seriousness of his manner, one might easily have guessed that in him one looked on a youth aflame with a consuming, zealous ambition to make his stewardship of men and his college culture yield the highest per cent of moral earnings. I felt proud to call him my friend. Another of my companions during the senior year was “Quiet” Sanderson, the student who had introduced me to Quarles. “Quiet” was one of those illogical and fanciful appellations in which the students delighted, and was paradoxically twisted from Sanderson’s fluent tendencies.