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adding Nettie’s suggestion.
    They shook hands and promised to meet again the following Friday night.
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    Sheldon Ackerman loved challenges and Project Success promised to be a satisfying one. He was sure it would help the young women. And it certainly would make teaching the 280 class more interesting. He leaned back in his large, comfortable leather chair, his feet on the ottoman, relaxing and thinking. His condo was decorated to reflect his masculine taste. The furniture and accessories in forest greens, beige, and browns, provided him a comfortable and relaxing atmosphere. His condo was on the top floor of this ten story condominium complex that he had designed and built. No one in the community knew he was the owner and builder—and he intended they remain ignorant of it indefinitely. The benefactor he was to confer with this week was none other than himself.
    A brilliant teenager, Sheldon had entered college at sixteen. At age twenty-four he had graduated from Harvard with an MBA and a doctorate in behavioral science. He ventured out into the world with a small inheritance from his grandfather. From the start, he seemed to have the Midas touch. He bought property and it went up. He bought stocks just before they split. He seemed to have a sixth sense about when to buy and when to sell. Soon he began investing in property on which he erected commercial buildings and shopping centers. And now he had amassed wealth and had no one to spend it on except his well-chosen charities.
    He was the only child of Sheldon Thomas Ackerman and Elaine Dodds Ackerman. Born late in their lives, he was destined not to enjoy their company for long. His mother, frail in health, was not able to conceive until she was forty-three years old.
    Elaine Ackerman, a loving and devoted mother, taught her son strong moral values. His father, Sheldon Ackerman, from whom he felt great love, was a shy, enigmatic man who, by example, taught his son the value of hard work and dependability. Both had passed on and he was alone.
    Like his father, Sheldon was shy. He hadn’t pursued the company of young ladies as he would have liked. At twenty-seven years of age, he fell head over heels in love with a lovely young woman and promptly got his heart broken. From then on, Sheldon replaced his need for love with long hours of hard work, the heady experience of making money, and basking in the power that attends wealth.
    The total focus on making money began to pale about two months before his thirty-fifth birthday, so he turned his attention to what he always had a yen to do—teach business on the university level in a small college town. Placing his business in the hands of trusted managers through a holding company, he applied for and received a teaching position at Fairfield University soon after he turned thirty-five. Fairfield had been a two- year college, but five years before Sheldon applied for a job there, it had become a four-year university. The community, however, would always sentimentally refer to it as Fairfield College. In the three years he had been on staff, he had written two books on business, and built the high-rise condominium complex. Now, he was working on an idea for a third book and feeling quite satisfied with his life here in Claytonville.
    He smiled as he thought about how well his 280 class had been going of late. The young women seemed to be responding in a way they hadn’t before. Could it be that he was watching his manner of speaking and tone of voice so as not to come over as Miss Bliss had accused him—pompous and demeaning? If so, he would have to give Miss Bliss her due.
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    When Sheldon conferred with Dean Atwood on Monday, the start of week four, telling him his idea for a project and suggesting that it and others following would be good material for another book, Dean Atwood fell all over himself. After all, Dr. Ackerman had an “in” with a wealthy benefactor who often chose to donate funds to Fairfield. And, the