Mr. Beef the butcher or Mr. Hat the haberdasher, life reached in,
seized him, handled him, stretched him, and unrolled him like a
piece of Irish lace on a Saturday-afternoon bargain-counter.

To move in the literary fashion I should say that this was all
because when way back in colonial days the hardy pioneers had
come to a bald place in Connecticut and asked of each other,
"Now, what shall we build here?" the hardiest one among 'em had
answered: "Let's build a town where theatrical managers can try
out musical comedies!" How afterward they founded Yale College
there, to try the musical comedies on, is a story every one
knows. At any rate one December, "Home James" opened at the
Shubert, and all the students encored Marcia Meadow, who sang a
song about the Blundering Blimp in the first act and did a shaky,
shivery, celebrated dance in the last.

Marcia was nineteen. She didn't have wings, but audiences agreed
generally that she didn't need them. She was a blonde by natural
pigment, and she wore no paint on the streets at high noon.
Outside of that she was no better than most women.

It was Charlie Moon who promised her five thousand Pall Malls if
she would pay a call on Horace Tarbox, prodigy extraordinary.
Charlie was a senior in Sheffield, and he and Horace were first
cousins. They liked and pitied each other.

Horace had been particularly busy that night. The failure of the
Frenchman Laurier to appreciate the significance of the new
realists was preying on his mind. In fact, his only reaction to a
low, clear-cut rap at his study was to make him speculate as to