for Lincoln. After settling himself in the dirty day-coach,
Claude fell to meditating upon his prospects. There was a Pullman
car on the train, but to take a Pullman for a daylight journey
was one of the things a Wheeler did not do.
Claude knew that he was going back to the wrong school, that he
was wasting both time and money. He sneered at himself for his
lack of spirit. If he had to do with strangers, he told himself,
he could take up his case and fight for it. He could not assert
himself against his father or mother, but he could be bold enough
with the rest of the world. Yet, if this were true, why did he
continue to live with the tiresome Chapins? The Chapin household
consisted of a brother and sister. Edward Chapin was a man of
twenty-six, with an old, wasted face,—and he was still going to
school, studying for the ministry. His sister Annabelle kept
house for him; that is to say, she did whatever housework was
done. The brother supported himself and his sister by getting odd
jobs from churches and religious societies; he “supplied” the
pulpit when a minister was ill, did secretarial work for the
college and the Young Men’s Christian Association. Claude’s
weekly payment for room and board, though a small sum, was very
necessary to their comfort.
Chapin had been going to the Temple College for four years, and
it would probably take him two years more to complete the course.
He conned his book on trolley-cars, or while he waited by the
track on windy corners, and studied far into the night. His
natural stupidity must have been something quite out of the
ordinary; after years of reverential study, he could not read the
Greek Testament without a lexicon and grammar at his elbow. He
gave a great deal of time to the practice of elocution and
oratory. At certain hours their frail domicile—it had been
thinly built for the academic poor and sat upon concrete blocks
in lieu of a foundation—re-echoed with his hoarse, overstrained
voice, declaiming his own orations or those of Wendell Phillips.
Annabelle Chapin was one of Claude’s classmates. She was not as
dull as her brother; she could learn a conjugation and recognize
the forms when she met with them again. But she was a gushing,
silly girl, who found almost everything in their grubby life too
good to be true; and she was, unfortunately, sentimental about
Claude. Annabelle chanted her lessons over and over to herself
while she cooked and scrubbed. She was one of those people who
can make the finest things seem tame and flat merely by alluding
to them. Last winter she had recited the odes of Horace about the
house—it was exactly her notion of the student-like thing to
do—until Claude feared he would always associate that poet with
the heaviness of hurriedly prepared luncheons.
Mrs. Wheeler liked to feel that Claude was assisting this worthy
pair in their struggle for an education; but he had long ago
decided that since neither of the Chapins got anything out of
their efforts but a kind of messy inefficiency, the struggle
might better have been relinquished in the beginning. He took
