NOW, OF COURSE, the quality and the seasonability of these winter dreams varied,
but the stuff of them remained. They persuaded Dexter several years later to pass up a
business course at the State university--his father, prospering now, would have paid
his way--for the precarious advantage of attending an older and more famous
university in the East, where he was bothered by his scanty funds. But do not get the
impression, because his winter dreams happened to be concerned at first with musings
on the rich, that there was anything merely snobbish in the boy. He wanted not
association with glittering things and glittering people--he wanted the glittering things
themselves. Often he reached out for the best without knowing why he wanted it--and
sometimes he ran up against the mysterious denials and prohibitions in which life
indulges. It is with one of those denials and not with his career as a whole that this
story deals.