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GLENN HARGIS, M.A., PH. D. Assistant Professor of History in Point Royal College, was in his office in the basement of Susan B. Anthony Hall; a small office: pink plaster walls, that carbon print of the Parthenon which is so familiar that it must be contemporaneous with the Parthenon itself, a flat desk, very meager, a World Almanac, a Point Royal catalogue, and a large class record, the latest New Haven Journal-Courier, Dr. Hargis himself, and that was all, till Ann Vickers strode in and this dungeon, accustomed to dismal discussions of cuts, marks, flunks, themes, and required reading, suddenly came alive.

Dr. Hargis, at his desk, stared up at her rain-shining cheeks and excited eyes. She stared down at him. He was, Ann noted, certainly not the “Greek god” that the hungry Francine found him, but he was a square, healthy, personable young man, with a broad forehead and cheerful eyes. He was smoking a pipe. Ann observed this with unexplained approval. Most of the male teachers at Point Royal were gray and worried and timid, and given to morality and peanut butter.

He stood up. His voice was unexpectedly thin, almost feminine, as he piped, “Yes? What can I do for you?”

As they sat down, he puffed his pipe grandly, she thought. Herself she leaned forward in the torture-seat in which, the year before, so many students had tried to explain to the professor of mathematics why young females sometimes prefer dancing to a mastery of differential calculus.

“I have a nine-thirty free,” she hurried, “and I can choose between Harmony, Shakespeare, and Gen European History to 1400.”

“Why not Harmony or Shakespeare? Fine fellow, Shakespeare. Taught about cakes and ale—a subject much neglected in this chaste atmosphere, I should judge. Or Harmony? My Gen to 1400 class is pretty full.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do anything with Harmony. I’m afraid I haven’t got much artistic temperament. I used to play the organ in church, but that’s as far as I ever got with music. And Shakespeare—my father and I used to read him aloud, and I hate this picking him to pieces that they call ‘studying’ him.”

“Very pretty, but then you ought to hate picking European History to pieces, too.”

“No, because I don’t know anything about it.”

“Tell me, Miss Uh—tell me precisely why would you like to study Gen European, aside from its convenience in occurring at nine-thirty?”

“I want to know it. I honestly do! I want to know! I hope some day to——A girl accused me of being a politician, yesterday, and I denied it, and then I got to thinking: perhaps I’d been lying to myself. Perhaps I will be a politician, if women ever get the vote. Why not? There has to be some kind of government, even if it’s not perfect and I guess there can’t be one without politicians.”

“Politicians, my dear young lady, are merely the middlemen of economics, and you know what we all think of middlemen. They take the Economic Truth and peddle small quantities of it to the customers, at an inordinate profit.”

“Well, aren’t—aren’t teachers, even college professors, middlemen of knowledge?”

He grinned. “Yes, maybe. And writers are middlemen of beauty—they adulterate it judiciously and put it up in small packages, with bright patent labels and imitation silk ribbon, and sell it under a snappy trade name. Perhaps. And lawyers are the middlemen of justice. Well, maybe we’ll let you be a politician. But what has that to do with Gen European and the hour of nine-thirty?—a chilly and dreadful hour in these Northern latitudes!”

“Well, if I did get to be a politician, I’d like to be the kind that knows something beyond getting a new post-office building for Passawumpaic Creek. Now that there won’t be any more great wars, I can see America being in close touch with Europe, and I’d like to work for that. But anyway, I want to know!”

“You are accepted for my class.” He rose; he beamed. “And it may interest you to hear that you are the first young lady in this cultured establishment that I have accepted gladly. Because you ‘want to know.’ Your confrères—or cosœurs, if you prefer—seem to have as cheerful an antipathy to scholarship as the young gentlemen I have known in the University of Chicago and my aboriginal Ottawatamie College. Doubtless, though, I shall find myself wrong.”

“You won’t,” said Ann, glumly. “Women are industrious, but they rarely know what they’re industrious about. They’re ants. You’ll find lots of girls that will work hard. They can recite everything in the book. But you won’t find many that know why they’re studying it, or that’ll read anything about it you don’t tell them to.”

“But you, I take it, will!”

“Why,” with a surprised candor, untouched by his irony, “you know I will!”

As she walked to the Student Volunteers’ meeting, Ann gloated, “He’s swell! He’s the only prof here that it’s fun to talk to!”

The Student Volunteers are an intercollegiate body whose members are so specifically pledged, so passionately eager, to become missionaries that, out of the forty-two Volunteers enrolled this year in Point Royal, five did later actually become missionaries. The Volunteers at their meetings sang hymns and prayed and heard papers on the rapid spread of Christianity in Beluchistan, Nigeria, or Mexico—which last, from the standpoint of Point Royal, was not Christian at all.

Today they had a real missionary, just returned from Burma. She did not talk of gilt domes and tinkling temple bells nor in the least of sitting with delicate native wenches when the mist was on the rice fields and the sun was dropping low. She talked of child mothers, of fever, and of scabby babies playing in the filth. Now Ann Vickers was less interested in mosaic temples than in feeding starved babies; nor was she cynical when the missionary sighed, “Oh, if you will only come help bring them the tidings of Jesus, so that the heathen may, like our own beloved Christian country, be utterly free from the spectacle of beggars and starving babies!” Ann nodded agreeably—but she had heard nothing. She had been thinking of red-headed Glenn Hargis.

Was he really witty, or just (her words, in 1910) “sort of flip and brash?”

How was it that she liked pipe-smell better than the glossy, warm scent that hung about Eula?

And, dejectedly, why was she so absent of mind, when they were receiving a missionary message right from the Field?

And, was Dr. Hargis married?

He was not.

Within twenty-four hours every girl on the campus knew that.

It was against Point Royal custom to have on the faculty a bachelor, especially a good-looking bachelor. But it appeared that Dr. Hargis was a cousin of the late president of Point Royal, the sainted Dr. Merribel Peaselee, and therefore guaranteed to be sound.

“Well, maybe,” said Mitzi Brewer, the Junior Class Problem, “but he looks like pie for breakfast to me!”

“Don’t be disgusting!” said Ann. “He has a very fine mind. He doesn’t think about anything except the lessons that history can teach us about how to reorganize human society. He has a real ideal of scholarship.”

“Well, Annie, he can’t teach me anything about how to reorganize society. Kick out the dean, run a free bus to the Yale Campus, and a dance every evening. And how would you like that? You’re pretty doggone pure, Ann. It hurts, when I look at you. But wait’ll you feel your oats, lamb! When I’m home knitting socks for my sixth sprig, you’ll be busting out, and yeaow!”

“You make me sick!” said Ann, with a feebleness which astonished her.

Though in her personal habits Ann was as respectable as the dean, Dr. Agatha Snow, though she was almost tediously wholesome and normal, with her basketball and course in domestic science, yet privately she had been restless about the conservatism of all thought (if any) at Point Royal. The shadow of old Oscar Klebs still hovered gray behind her. She was irritated that not a dozen of the girls considered the workers as anything but inferiors; that they assumed that New Washington, Ohio, was necessarily superior to Vienna, Venice, and Stockholm combined. Though she regarded herself as a solid Christian, even a future missionary, she was distressed that it should be regarded as ill-bred to criticize the Bible as one criticized Shakespeare. It was not that Point Royal, in 1910, was as “fundamentalist” as a frontier camp-meeting of 1810. The girls did not accept the Bible unquestioning because they were passionately uplifted by it, but precisely because they were not enough interested in the Bible, in Religion, either to fight for them or to doubt. They hadn’t enough faith to be either zealots or atheists. Ann knew that there were greater women’s colleges—Vassar, Wellesley, Smith—in which some small proportion of the girls did actually regard scholarship as equal in rank with tennis. But Point Royal, like a host of Midwestern denominational colleges, exhibited perfectly that American superiority to time and space whereby in one single Man of Affairs may be found simultaneously the religion of 1600, the marital notions of 1700, the economics of 1800, and the mechanical skill of 2500.

This irritation, and her memory of Oscar Klebs, had driven Ann to form the Point Royal Socialist Club. It was rather mild, and very small. The average attendance was six, and they sat on the floor in one of the girls’ rooms and said excitedly that it wasn’t fair that certain men should have millions while others starved, and that they would all read Karl Marx just as soon as they could get around to it. Once Tess Morrissey, a stern young woman, said they ought to study birth-control, and they gasped and talked with nervous lowered voices. “Yes, women should be allowed to govern their own destinies,” Ann whispered. But when Tess, from her work in biology, murmured of actual methods of control, they looked uncomfortable and began to discuss the beauties of woman suffrage, which was to end all crime and graft.

No one in the Socialist Club saw anything inconsistent in Ann’s belonging to it and to the Student Volunteers. It was the era of a fantasy known as Christian Socialism. It was the era of windy optimism, of a pre-war “idealism” which was satisfied with faith in place of statistics, of a certainty on one hand that Capitalism was divinely appointed to last forever, and on the other that Capitalism would be soon and bloodlessly replaced by an international Utopian commonwealth rather like the home-life of Louisa M. Alcott. It was from this era that everyone who in 1930 was from thirty-five to fifty-five years old imbibed those buoyant, Shavian, liberal, faintly clownish notions which he was to see regarded by his sons and daughters as on a par with Baptist ethics and the cosmogony of Moses.

Ann Vickers, with the most aspiring mind of her class, as a college Junior in 1910, was nevertheless nearer mentally to William Wordsworth and the pastoral iconoclasms of 1832 than to the burning spirits who as Juniors in 1929 and 1930 and 1931 and 1932 were to be so clear-headed that they would be bored by the ghostly warriors who in the 1930’s went on blowing defiant conch-shells over the body of a dead Victorianism quite as much as by the original Victorian proprieties; and who would despise more than either of these the sour degeneracy of the decade just before them, when the wrecked Odysseuses of the Great War had from 1919 to 1929 unceasingly piped, “Let us eat, drink, and be nasty, for the world has gone to hell, and after us there will never again be youth and springtime and hope.”

So unprophetic of this new crusade was Ann and all her generation that though in 1932 she was to be but forty-one years old, yet her story must perforce be almost as much of an historical romance, a chronicle of musty beliefs and customs, as though she had lived in Florence of the Medicis. So is it with all of us who are old enough to remember the Great War as an actuality. In the forty or fifty years that we have lived by the lying calendar, we have gone through five centuries of hectic change, and like Ann we behold ourselves as contemporaries at once with Leonardo da Vinci and the dreadful beard of General Grant and the latest vulgarian of the radio and the latest twenty-two-year-old physicist who flies his own aëroplane and blandly votes the Communist ticket and, without either clerical sanction or the chatter about “sexual freedom” of the slightly older radicals, goes casually to living with his girl, and who familiarly tames and spins and splits the atom which, when we were his age, seemed as mysterious and intangible as the Holy Ghost.

Outside these pious socialistic retreats, Ann heard no more of revolution than if she had been a bridge-player. She hoped that she would hear something of its gospel from the lively Dr. Glenn Hargis, and she did, during his first lecture.

It was in Classroom C2, in Susan B. Anthony Hall, a room of hard shiny chairs with tablet-arms like a Thompson’s Lunch, of blackboards, a low dais for the instructor, and a dismal portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe. It had that traditional and sanctified dreariness characteristic of all classrooms, marriage-license bureaus, hospitals, doctors’ waiting-rooms, and Southern Methodist Churches. In this cavern, designed to make learning uncomfortable and virtuous, the forty girls were an old-fashioned garden, and Glenn Hargis, glistening on the dais, a red-headed gardener.

He grumbled for a few minutes about the cooking and laundry of scholarship—office appointments, themes, required reading—then smiled on them and launched out:

“Young ladies, if I am granted the skill, I wish in this class not so much to add anything to your knowledge as to try to subtract prejudices. Despite the living evidence of uncovered Pompeii today, we tend all of us to feel that people who lived before 1400 A.D., certainly people who lived before 500 A.D., were somehow as different from us as men from monkeys. It is the most difficult feat of scholarship cum imagination to understand that the citizens of Pompeii, when it was sealed by ashes in 79, had elections and electioneering and political posters, graft and reformism and the pork barrel, exactly like ourselves; that ladies went shopping and bought sausages and wine, that haughty and probably faulty plumbers fussed over the water pipes.

“A characteristic misconception of ancient history as being fundamentally different from our own is heard frequently in the idiotic discussion ‘Why did Rome fall?’ An ecclesiast will tell you that Rome fell because they drank wine and had races on the Sabbath and permitted dancing girls.”

Ann nodded. She had heard the Reverend Mr. Donnelly and half a dozen other Reverends explain just this, in Waubanakee.

“The vegetarian will prove that Rome fell because the degenerate late Romans departed from their pristine diet of herbs and fruit, and gorged on meat. The professional patriot will explain the fall by the Roman degeneracy in military training and armaments. And in the early days of America, when bathing was just coming in, there were sages who explained that Rome fell solely because the Roman dandies took to daily hot bathing.

“But none of these retrospective prophets ever consider the fact that actually Rome never did fall!

“Rome did not fall! Rome changed! It was invaded by barbarians—the ancestors of the present English, and rather like them in rude health and possessiveness. It was invaded by plagues. In the Middle Ages it was an insignificant town, plainly inferior to Venice and Naples in that they had seaports, while Ostia Mare, the San Pedro of Rome, had silted up. But Rome did not fall. It has gone on, always, through changing fortunes, and is today along with New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Peking, Tokio, Rio, and Buenos Aires one of the—let me see: how many does that make?—one of the nine, or is it ten, ruling cities of the world, with a population nearly equal to the entire Roman Empire of the classic day!

“It is such a point of view that I want you to seek, that I want myself to preserve, throughout this entire course; to keep the scientific attitude, and to inquire, whenever wiseacres explain, in classroom or pulpit or by the cracker-barrel, just why Rome fell, why the Dark Ages were dark, why the people endured the tyranny of feudalism, and why the Protestant Reformation was divinely appointed—to inquire whether Rome really did fall, whether the Dark Ages were so very much darker than South Chicago in 1910, whether a feudal serf was necessarily more miserable than a freeborn Pittsburgh miner in this blessed year of star-spangled civilization, and whether there may not be quite decent and sensitive persons who get as much solace from the high mass, even today, as from a sermon by Gypsy Jones.”

In that pre-Mencken day, Dr. Hargis was preaching heresy so damnable that Ann broke her quick breathing of delight with a gasp of fear. She glanced about. Some of the girls looked shocked, some of them looked bored ... and most of them were obediently making examination-passing notes in their neat little books with their neat little fountain pens, precisely as they would have if Dr. Hargis had said that the leghorn hat was invented at Sienna in A.D. 12 by a lame maiden aunt of Augustus Cæsar. She was relieved, and turned again toward Glenn Hargis as she had turned toward no masculine magnet since Adolph Klebs.