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same limitations) rather than battles and slaughters. The games are loosely played perhaps; competition and wealth have not rendered it possible for a team "to develop the game." In a word, the athletic question or disease exists only potentially at the University of Chicago.

The same spirit is true of more serious undertakings: two college settlements in the hard districts of Chicago are supported and manned by the students. In spite of the severe struggles they are making for their education, many of them desire to carry something in time and effort and ideals, even in precious money, to the desolate who are at their doors. The classes and clubs of the settlement show that the college students feel the impossibility of an academic life that lives solely to itself. On the philanthropic committee, and as teachers in the settlement classes, men and woman, instructors and students, work side by side. The interest in sociological studies, which is commoner at Chicago than elsewhere, stimulates this modern activity in college life.

All these clubs and athletic teams exist not merely for amusement, but also because the students feel that one cannot have a full-fledged university without them, They make up the American idea of a university, just as the graduate school, the laboratory, and the elective system go to make a modern university. And this is noteworthy that the students feel a responsibility to construct a great university as much in their way as the faculty and the trustees in theirs. They feel the exhilaration and loyalty to the scope of the institution as men working shoulder to shoulder in a new country, planning for a brilliant future. This sense of personal interest and co-operation which goes far to make men of the students, not college boys, manifests itself most strikingly in the relationship or camaraderie with the faculty, and especially in loyalty to the president. I believe that nowhere in the United States is a college president so thoroughly known and heartily liked and admired by all students as President Harper. Not only does every student feel that the president knows

him personally, but he knows that the president has an individual interest in him and his affairs. He feels that he may go to him about his private concerns, and as far as his position will permit it, the president may be depended upon to see the college life from the student's point of view. He does not impress them as merely an august and powerful personage at the head of a great corporation. This is more than mere popularity-it is loyalty and devotion. The students, one may say without exception, would be unwilling to commit any act that might place President Harper and the new university in an ungracious light before the public. They would care little for the possible punishment as compared to the pain and difficulties they might give the president. The result is that student government is one of the least perplexing problems at the university. This fact may be due in part to the large proportion of mature graduate students, who sober the usual college spirit; but I think that the deeper cause is the truer one-a sense of loyalty to the young university and its responsible executive.

It may be said that a government of love and good-feeling is possible in a university of one thousand students, but quite impossible when three times that number must be cared for. The system of the University of Chicago is very elastic at this point. The institution is subdivided, and control and government will be vested more and more largely in the boards that immediately supervise certain divisions. At present the numerous deans-eight I think in all-make it possible to understand the individual work of the students; make it possible to give every student a feeling that he possesses an individuality which means something. Indeed, with us the danger is on the other side-that the student will be pampered into feeling that the university depends altogether upon him.

A young man may walk, some fine May morning, down the flag-stones of the yard at Harvard; the sun comes flooding in through the time-honored trees, the vines in tender green are

creeping about the stiff deformity of this building or softening the angular lines of that, and the very breeze flutters the dignified air of the place; those isolated buildings, each in itself so awkward and plain, with the wide openings between, through which the breezes and the sunshine play-subtly they present themselves to him like a slowly making picture of a past, a puritan past, with its rigidity, its scorn of beauty, its clean correctness and integrity of life. The wide spaces, the uncompromising architecture of the halls, are an incarnation of New England, softened now by time and its associations. And this sense of a fine New England past grows richer as he wanders up Brattle Street or Kirkland Street, that have seen so much which has had distinction in our America. Emerson, and Lowell, and Longfellow -the inadequate but just expression of our early life-all those and many others have left a benediction to Cambridge. Surely nowhere else on our continent is life so precious in its past possessions and subtle influences, as just here in this cluster of puritan buildings, in this fresh air that comes in from the

sea.

And if it be his good fortune to take up his home there, to live that life for four or perhaps seven years, he will find that the place is not merely of the past it has to-day a very definite life of its own. If he is carefully conscious of it all, he will note that this definite ideal of life, made of tradition and sure innovation, is moulding him inevitably, has moulded him irrevocably. If he has given himself up to it freely, he will leave it all with a sad home sickness, a regret of going away and leaving himself. His critics will say that his train. ing has been snobbish, that he belongs to a class, that he is "indifferent" (let us hope that he is to cheap affairs!), that he is not American-whatever that may be. And if he is frank with himself, he will own a part of this impeachment, but not as an impeachment. What has been valuable in his past training is not so much any one piece of work, any one great scholar's influence, as the spirit of the place, its standards of work, its ideals of excellence in short, its

aristocratic bearing. In so far as he has absorbed that intolerant love for the most excellent and but one excellence, he has come out a Harvard man.

We meet a new order of things at Chicago. It is not my purpose to contrast the worth of the two ideals of life, or to judge them; indeed, I have said that Chicago resembles Harvard, paradoxical as it is, in many vital respects. The complete intellectual, unsectarian independence in spirit is the same at Chicago as at Cambridge; the desire for high standards in scholarship is the same; the manliness and maturity of the students, born of great freedom, resembles the Harvard way of life. The multitudinous subjects and teachers are characteristic of all large universities. The one fact that at Chicago professionalism in athletics is absolutely unknown, although the Western colleges have not outgrown the habit of buying success if possible, places the new university with its older sister.

But at the University of Chicago the student graduates as a person, not as a member of a class. His work and student life are individual from the very first. He enters the university when he pleases; he graduates when he pleases. His course has been individual and democratic. The conventions of an old society, the ambitions of a select set, do not trouble him. He has had great freedom, great opportunities, and the stimulus of an eager, emulous life. He goes away certainly not without some insight into what learning and scholarship mean, but without class loyalties, without the intimate personal life so dear to us who have had it.

We look to a new order of things in learning, as in national and social life. In that new life, one fancies, the dominating forces will be traditionless. The uninterrupted appreciation of intellectual goods will no longer be true. The subjects taught will increase without number, and the most catholic means of estimation or valuation will be employed. Our new student will be contemptuous of mere culture, of anything that derives its respect from the past alone; he will despise forms and ceremonies, but he will be powerful in life.

I

By Edith Wharton

ELIA CORBETT was too happy; her happiness frightened her. Not on theological grounds, however; she was sure that people had a right to be happy; but she was equally sure that it was a right seldom recognized by destiny. And her happiness almost touched the confines of pain-it bordered on that sharp ecstasy which she had known, through one sleepless night after another, when what had now become a reality had haunted her as an unattainable longing.

Delia Corbett was not in the habit of using what the French call gros mots in the rendering of her own emotions; she took herself, as a rule, rather flippantly, with a dash of contemptuous pity. But she felt that she had now entered upon a phase of existence wherein it became her to pay herself an almost reverential regard. Love had set his golden crown upon her forehead, and the awe of the office allotted her subdued her doubting heart. To her had been given the one portion denied to all other women on earth, the immense, the unapproachable privilege of becoming Laurence Corbett's wife.

Here she burst out laughing at the sound of her own thoughts, and rising from her seat walked across the drawing-room and looked at herself in the mirror above the mantel- piece. She was past thirty and had never been very pretty; but she knew herself to be capable of loving her husband better and pleasing him longer than any other woman in the world. She was not afraid of rivals; he and she had seen each other's souls.

She turned away, smiling carelessly at her insignificant reflection, and went back to her arm-chair near the balcony. The room in which she sat was very beautiful; it pleased Corbett to make all his surroundings beautiful. It was

the drawing-room of his hotel in Paris, and the balcony near which his wife sat overlooked a small bosky garden framed in ivied walls, with a mouldering terracotta statue in the centre of its cupshaped lawn. They had now been married some two months, and, after travelling for several weeks, had both desired to return to Paris; Corbett because he was really happier there than elsewhere, Delia because she passionately longed to enter as a wife the house where she had so often come and gone as a guest. How she used to find herself dreaming in the midst of one of Corbett's delightful dinners (to which she and her husband were continually being summoned) of a day when she might sit at the same table, but facing its master, a day when no carriage should wait to whirl her away from the brightly lit porte-cochère, and when, after the guests had gone, he and she should be left alone in his library, and she might sit down beside him and put her hand in his! The high-minded reader may infer from this that I am presenting him, in the person of Delia Corbett, with a heroine whom he would not like his wife to meet; but how many of us could face each other in the calm consciousness of moral rectitude if our inmost desire were not hidden under a convenient garb of lawful observance?

Delia Corbett, as Delia Benson, had been a very good wife to her first husband; some people (Corbett among them) had even thought her laxly tolerant of "poor Benson's" weaknesses. But then she knew her own; and it is admitted that nothing goes so far toward making us blink the foibles of others as the wish to have them extend a like mercy to ourselves. Not that Delia's foibles were of a tangible nature; they belonged to the order which escapes analysis by the coarse process of our social standards. Perhaps their very immateriality, the consciousness that she cod never be brought to book

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for them before any human tribunal, made her the more restive under their weight; for she was of a nature to prefer buying her happiness to stealing it. But her rising scruples were perpetually being allayed by some fresh indiscretion of Benson's, to which she submitted with an undeviating amiability which flung her into the opposite extreme of wondering if she didn't really influence him to do wrong-if she mightn't help him to do better. All these psychological subtleties exerted, however, no influence over her conduct which, since the day of her marriage, had been a model of delicate circumspection. It was only necessary to look at Benson to see that the most eager reformer could have done little to improve him. In the first place he must have encountered the initial difficulty, most disheartening to reformers, of making his neophyte distinguish between right and wrong. Undoubtedly it was within the measure even of Benson's primitive perceptions to recognize that some actions were permissible and others were not; but his sole means of classifying them was to try both, and then deny having committed those of which his wife disapproved. Delia had once owned a poodle who greatly desired to sleep on a white fur rug which she destined to other uses. She and the poodle disagreed on the subject, and the latter, though submitting to her authority (when reinforced by a whip), could never be made to see the justice of her demand, and consequently (as the rug frequently revealed) never missed an opportunity of evading it when her back was turned. Her husband often reminded her of the poodle, and, not having a whip or its moral equivalent to control him with, she had long since resigned herself to seeing him smudge the whiteness of her early illusions. The worst of it was that her resignation was such a cheap virtue. She had to be perpetually rousing herself to a sense of Benson's enormities; through the ever-lengthening perspective of her indifference they looked as small as the details of a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Now and then she tried to remind herself that she had married him for love;

but she was well aware that the sentiment she had once entertained for him had nothing in common with the state of mind which the words now represented to her; and this naturally diminished the force of the argument. She had married him at nineteen, because he had beautiful blue eyes and always wore a gardenia in his coat; really, as far as she could remember, these considerations had been the determining factors in her choice. Delia as a child (her parents were since dead) had been a much-indulged daughter, with a liberal allowance of pocket-money, and permission to spend it unquestioned and unadvised. Subsequently, she used sometimes to look, in a critical humor, at the various articles which she had purchased in her teens; futile chains and lockets, valueless china knick-knacks, and poor engravings of sentimental pictures. These, as a chastisement to her taste, she religiously preserved; and they often made her think of Benson. No one, she could not but reflect, would have blamed her if, with the acquirement of a fuller discrimination, she had thrown them all out of the window and replaced them by some object of permanent merit; but she was expected not only to keep Benson for life, but to conceal the fact that her taste had long since discarded him.

It could hardly be expected that a woman who reasoned so dispassionately about her mistakes should attempt to deceive herself about her preferences. Corbett personified all those finer amenities of mind and manners which may convert the mere act of being into a beneficent career; to Delia he seemed the most admirable man she had ever met, and she would have thought it disloyal to her best aspirations not to admire him. But she did not attempt to palliate her warmer feeling under the mask of a plausible esteem; she knew that she loved him, and scorned to disavow that also. So well, however, did she keep her secret that Corbett himself never suspected it, until her husband's death freed her from the obligation of concealment. Then, indeed, she gloried in its confession; and after two years of widowhood, and more than

two months of marriage, she was still under the spell of that moment of exquisite avowal.

She was reliving it now, as she often did in the rare hours which separated her from her husband; when presently she heard his step on the stairs, and started up with the blush of eighteen. As she walked across the room to meet him she asked herself perversely (she was given to such obliqueness of selfscrutiny) if to a dispassionate eye he would appear as complete, as supremely well-equipped as she beheld him, or if she walked in a cloud of delusion, dense as the god-concealing mist of Homer. But whenever she put this question to herself, Corbett's appearance instantly relegated it to the limbo of solved enigmas; he was so obviously admirable that she wondered that people didn't stop her in the street to attest her good fortune.

As he came forward now, this renewal of satisfaction was so strong in her that she felt an impulse to seize him and assure herself of his reality; he was so perilously like the phantasms of joy which had mocked her dissatisfied past. But his coat-sleeve was convincingly tangible; and, pinching it, she felt the muscles beneath.

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What-all alone?" he said, smiling back her welcome.

"No, I wasn't-I was with you!" she exclaimed; then fearing to appear fatuous, added, with a slight shrug," Don't be alarmed-it won't last."

"That's what frightens me," he answered, gravely.

"Precisely," she laughed; "and I shall take good care not to reassure you!"

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They stood face to face for a ment, reading in each other's eyes the completeness of their communion; then he broke the silence by saying, "By the way, I'd forgotten; here's a letter for you."

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What-and leave Boston, and her kindergartens, and associated charities, and symphony concerts, and debating clubs? You don't know Aunt Mary!"""

"No, I don't. It seems so incongruous that you should adore such a bundle of pedantries."

"I forgive that, because you've never seen her. How I wish you could!"

He stood looking down at her with the all-promising smile of the happy lover. Well, if she won't come to us we'll go to her."

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Laurence-and leave this!"

"It will keep-we'll come back to it. My dear girl, don't beam so; you make me feel as if you hadn't been happy until now."

"No-but it's your thinking of it!" "I'll do more than think; I'll act; I'll take you to Boston to see your Aunt Mary."

"Oh, Laurence, you'd hate doing it." "Not doing it together."

She laid her hand for a moment on his. "What a difference that does make in things!" she said, as she broke the seal of the letter.

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'Well, I'll leave you to commune with Aunt Mary. When you've done, come and find me in the library."

Delia sat down joyfully to the perusal of her letter, but as her eye travelled over the closely written pages her grati fied expression turned to one of growing concern; and presently, thrusting it back into the envelope, she followed her husband to the library. It was a charming room and singularly indica tive, to her fancy, of its occupant's character; the expanse of harmonious bindings, the fruity bloom of Renaissance She nodded. "I haven't heard from bronzes, and the imprisoned sunlight

She took it unregardingly, her eyes still deep in his; but as her glance turned to the envelope she uttered a note of pleasure.

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Oh, now nice-it's from your only rival!"

Your Aunt Mary?"

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