AN IDYL OF THE IDYL


_In Which a Young Man Arrives at His Last Ditch and a Young Girl Jumps
Over It_

Utterly unequipped for anything except to ornament his environment, the
crash in Steel stunned him. Dazed but polite, he remained a passive
observer of the sale which followed and which apparently realized
sufficient to satisfy every creditor, but not enough for an income to
continue a harmlessly idle career which he had supposed was to continue
indefinitely.

He had never earned a penny; he had not the vaguest idea of how people
made money. To do something, however, was absolutely necessary.

He wasted some time in finding out just how much aid he might expect from
his late father's friends, but when he understood the attitude of society
toward a knocked-out gentleman he wisely ceased to annoy society, and
turned to the business world.

Here he wasted some more time. Perhaps the time was not absolutely
wasted, for during that period he learned that he could use nobody who
could not use him; and as he appeared to be perfectly useless, except for
ornament, and as a business house is not a kindergarten, and furthermore,
as he had neither time nor money to attend any school where anybody could
teach him anything, it occurred to him to take a day off for minute and
thorough self-examination concerning his qualifications and even his
right to occupy a few feet of space upon the earth's surface.