Dave said, red color flushing over his pale face. "Father threw that up to me. You've the nerve and character to do it and Myra's the character to want you to and wait for you. You know what I think of you both for it. But it's different with Alice and me. You're made to be a doctor and you want to be one; you've never wanted anything else. But I never was made for a minister. I was made for business; I've proved that, I think; and I'm going into business with ten thousand dollars put up for me by the closest judge of business propositions that I ever knew. And there's no soul-selling to that. But you'd thought—you'd thought," repeated Dave, drawing a deep breath and holding it a moment before he was able to speak, "when I'd taken it and told father, you'd thought I was Judas Iscariot."
His head jerked up stiffer and Lan saw the sinews of his neck stand out with his strain upon himself; his eyes went wet and he winked to clear them.
"Alice is over at Willard for supper with Myra," Lan said; he had to say something.
Dave relaxed. "Yes; I know," he acknowledged and Lan turned away and started to wash. Dave began taking off the old suit which he was wearing and which he had put on when he came to his room less than an hour ago.
That careful habit of sparing his better suit, though no longer necessary to Dave Herrick, had been bred in him too deeply to cast it off merely because recently, if he wanted, he might buy himself with his own earned money as many suits of clothes as anybody in college. Clothes meant to him what they can mean
