Part 5 (1/2)
”I suppose it does help, your being my cousin. But the thing depends on you. Unless you make a decided change you'll never get on.”
”What change do you suggest? Item one, please?”
James looked straight at him. ”You lack bedrock principles, Jeff.”
”Do I?”
”Take your habits. Two or three times you've been seen coming out of saloons.”
”Expect I went in to get a drink.”
”It's not generally known, of course, but if it reached Prexy he'd fire you so quick your head would swim.”
”I dare say.”
The senior looked at him significantly. ”You're the last man that ought to go to such places. There's such a thing as an inherited tendency.”
The jaw muscles stood out like ropes under the flesh of Jeff's lean face. ”We'll not discuss that.”
”Very well. Cut it out. A drinking man is handicapped too heavily to win.”
”Much obliged. Second count in the indictment, please.”
”You've got strange, unsettling notions. The profs don't like them.”
”Don't they?”
”You know what I mean. We didn't make this world. We've got to take it as it is. You can't make it over. There are always going to be rich people and poor ones. Just because you've fed indigestibly on Ibsen and Shaw you can't change facts.”
”So you advise?”
”Soft pedal your ideas if you must have them.”
”Hasn't a man got to see things as straight as he can?”
”That's no reason for calling in the neighbors to rejoice with him because he has astigmatism.”
Jeff came back with a tag of Emerson, whose phrases James was fond of quoting in his speeches. ”Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”
”You can push that too far. It isn't practical. We've got to make compromises, especially with established things.”
Jeff sat up on the bed. Points of light were dancing in his big eyes.
”That's what the Pharisees said to Jesus when he wouldn't stand for lies because they were deep rooted and for injustice because it had become respectable.”
”Oh, if you're going to compare yourself to Christ--”
”Verden University is supposed to stand for Christianity, isn't it?
It was because Jesus whanged away at social and industrial freedom, at fraternity, at love on earth, that he had to endure the Cross. He got under the upper cla.s.s skin when he attacked the traditional lies of vested interests. Now why doesn't Bland preach the things that Jesus taught?”