Church, who had visited New York. This reverend doctor was violently opposed to art museums, novels, and symphony orchestras, but he talked about them and he was the only person Peter knew in Toledo who did. He railed against the sins of New York and the vices of Paris but, also, he described them.
In the matter of a university education, his mother took a high hand, precluding all discussion and indecision by sending him willy-nilly to Williams. Her brother had been a Williams man and she prayed that Peter might like to be one too. The experiment was not unsuccessful. The charm in Peter's nature began to expand at college and he even made a few friends, the names of most of which he could no longer remember, when he spoke to me of his college days some years afterwards. He realized that the reason he had made so few in Toledo was that the people of Toledo were not his kind of people. They lived in a world which did not exist for him. They lived in the world of Toledo while he lived in the world of books. At college, he began to take an interest in personalities; he began to take an interest in life itself. He studied French—it was the only course he thoroughly enjoyed—and he began to read Gautier in the original. Then, at the instigation of a particularly intelligent professor, he passed on to Barbey d'Aurevilly, to Huysmans, to Laforgue, and to Mallarmé.
His holidays were always a torture for the boy.
