"Bully for you!" I cried, in spite of my neutral intentions.
"But mother," he continued, "has been reading the Barsetshire novels all summer, and Trollope always makes her homesick for the 'old home.' She is crazy anyway over the English cathedral towns, and hopes to be buried in one when she dies. And just now she's got a kind of Golden-Age complex. She hopes to save me from the democracy by sending me to one of the old Eastern colleges, where I shall associate with 'young gentlemen' from Anglicized prep schools, and live in a Gothic dormitory, and be tutored by Rhodes scholars, who are mostly nuts. Dorothy and I have decided that we want to go to a State University and get acquainted with the Plain People. And so mother carries us off to Santo Espiritu and segregates us with the Holy Father, in the hope that the seeds of grace and exclusiveness will take root in our unsanctified hearts."
"She is 'getting results'!" I said to myself; and then aloud: "But don't you like California?"
"Sure!" he said, with his father's flickering smile. "Who wouldn't? It's just the place to go to Heaven in. But it doesn't seem like our own old Yankee Land out here. No one hurries. No one but the Japanese farmer does a lick of
