The Professor's House

8 Pages 2018 Words

here” (247). St. Peter did not want to succumb to the materialism that he was increasingly seeing in his family. He seemed to be unsure as to which situation was worse: his moving to the new house or his keeping both houses to make everyone, including himself, happy. St. Peter also reflects that his younger self was more what he aspired to be than the man he had become. He observes that “life with this Kansas boy, little as there had been of it, was the realest of his lives” (240). St. Peter seems to appreciate his young self more because he was primitive and seemingly above material things.
St. Peter fights a never-ending battle with his wife, Lillian: her materialism versus his idealism. “They had been young people with good qualities….but they could not have been happy if Lillian had not inherited a small income from her father….it had made all the difference in the world” (233). St. Peter hints that whereas he would have been happy with what they had between them, Lillian would not have been happy without her servants, doing housework and things as the wives of his colleagues did.
Another demonstration of St. Peter’s idealism is his firm belief in fate. He “thought he had fared well with fate. He wouldn’t choose to live his life over-he might not have such good luck again” (234). St. Peter claims that “he had had two romances: one of the hea...