"Now, hold on, Jim! I've thought this thing all over, and I've made up my mind. It ain't any use to go on talking about it. What good would it do me to go to school another year, come out without a dollar, and no more fitted for earning a living for her than I am now? And, besides all that, I couldn't draw a free breath thinking of her here workin' away to keep things moving, liable at any minute to break down." Hartley gazed at him in despair, and with something like awe. It was a tremendous transformation in the young, ambitious student. He felt in a way responsible for the calamity, and that he ought to use every effort to bring the boy to his senses. Like most men in America, and especially Western men, he still clung to the idea that a man was entirely responsible for his success or failure in life. He had not admitted that conditions of society might be so adverse that only men of most exceptional endowments, and willing and able to master many of the best and deepest and most sacred of their inspirations and impulses, could succeed. Of the score of specially promising young fellows who had been with him at school, seventeen had dropped out and down. Most of them had married and gone back to farming, or to earn a precarious living in the small, dull towns where farmers trade and traders farm. Conditions were too adverse; they simply weakened and slipped slowly back into dullness and an oxlike or else a fretful patience. Thinking of these men, and thinking their failure due to themselves alone, Hartley could not endure the idea of his friend adding one more to the list of failures. He sprang up at last. "Say, Bert, you might just as well hang y'rself, and done with it! Why, it's suicide! I can't allow it. I started in at college bravely, and failed because I'd let it go too long. I couldn't study--couldn't get down to it; but you--why, old man, I'd _bet_ on you!" He had a tremor in his voice. "I hate like thunder to see you give up your plans. Say, you can't afford to do this; it's too much to pay." "No, it ain't." "I say it is. What do you get, in----" "I think so much o' her that----" "Oh, nonsense! You'd get over this in a week." "Jim!" called Albert warningly, sharply. "All right," said Jim, in the tone of a man who felt that it was all wrong--"all right; but the time'll come when you'll wish I'd--You ain't doin' the girl enough good to make up for the harm you're doin' yourself." He broke off again, and said in a tone of peculiar meaning: "I'm done. I'm all through, and I c'n see you're through with Jim Hartley. Why, Bert, look here--No? All right!"