Chapter 13

Quin’s desire for self-improvement soon became an obsession. With Miss Enid’s assistance he got into a night course at the university, and proceeded to attack his ignorance with something of the fierce determination he had attacked the Hun the year before in France. He plunged through bogs of history, got hopelessly entangled in the barbed wire of mathematics, had hand-to-hand struggles with belligerent parts of speech, and more than once suffered the shell-shock of despair. But his watchword now, as then, was, “Up and at ‘em!” And before long he had the satisfaction of seeing his enemy gradually giving way.

Having taken his small public into his confidence in regard to his belated ambition to get an education, he was surprised to find how ready everybody was to help him. Mr. Chester not only assisted him with his mathematics, but insisted upon taking him to hear good music, in the vain effort to reclaim an ear hopelessly attuned to jazz and rag-time. Mr. Martel devoted Sunday afternoons to making him read aloud from the classics, with great attention to precise enunciation. Miss Isobel still looked after his moral welfare, and Miss Enid continued to devote herself to his social improvement. But it remained for Madam Bartlett to render him the service of which he was most in need. Whenever the bubble of his self-esteem threatened to carry him away, she always took pains to puncture it.

“Don’t let them make a fool of you, Graham,” she said one day, as she leaned heavily upon his arm in a painful effort to walk without her crutches—an experiment that she allowed neither one of her daughters to share, as they invariably limped with her and got frightened when she stumbled. “They all treat you like a puppy that has learned to walk on its hind legs. Remember that you belong on your hind legs. You are only doing what most boys in your position do in their teens. If you were as smart as they claim, you would have got an education long ago. But young people these days have no sense! Just look at my granddaughter, for instance.”

There being no direction in which he was more eager to look, Quin gave her his undivided attention.

“I’ve spent thousands of dollars on that girl’s education,” Madam continued, “and what do you suppose she elected to specialize in? ‘Expression’! In my day they called it elocution. When a girl was too dumb to learn anything else, the teacher got money out of her parents by teaching her to swing her arms around her hear and say, ‘Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night.’ Now they all want to write poetry, or play the flute, or go on the stage, or some other fool thing like that.”