Young Peoples Pride | Page 2

do live in the East Sixties instead of Macdougal Alley when a page comes in discreetly for Johnny Chipman. Johnny rises like an agitated blond robin who has just spied the very two worms he was keeping room for to top off breakfast. "Well" he says to the world at large. "They're only fifteen minutes late apiece this time."
He darts out into the hall and reappears in a moment, a worm on either side. Both worms will fit in easily with the youthful assortment already gathered--neither can be more than twenty-five.
Oliver Crowe is nearly six feet, vividly dark, a little stooping, dressed like anybody else in the Yale Club from hair parted in the middle to low heavyish brown shoes, though the punctured patterns on the latter are a year or so out of date. There is very little that is remarkable about his appearance except the round, rather large head that shows writer or pugilist indifferently, brilliant eyes, black as black warm marble under heavy tortoise-shell glasses and a mouth that is not weak in the least but somehow burdened by a pressure upon it like a pressure of wings, the pressure of that kind of dream which will not release the flesh it inhabits always and agonizes often until it is given perfect body and so does not release it until such flesh has ceased. At present he is not the youngest anything, except, according to himself 'the youngest failure in advertising,' but a book of nakedly youthful love-poetry, which in gloomy moments he wishes had never been written, although the San Francisco Warbler called it as 'tensely vital as the Shropshire Lad,' brought him several column reviews and very nearly forty dollars in cash at twenty-one and since then many people of his own age and one or two editors have considered him "worth watching."
Ted Billett is dark too, but it is a ruddy darkness with high clear color of skin. He could pass anywhere as a College Senior and though his clothes seem to have been put on anyhow with no regard for pressing or tailoring they will always raise a doubt in the minds of the uninstructed as to whether it is not the higher carelessness that has dictated them rather than ordinary poverty--a doubt that, in many cases, has proved innocently fortunate for Ted. His hands are a curious mixture of square executive ability and imaginative sensitiveness and his surface manners have often been described as 'too snotty' by delicate souls toward whom Ted was entirely unconscious of having acted with anything but the most disinterested politeness. On the other hand a certain even-tempered recklessness and capacity for putting himself in the other fellow's place made him one of the few popularly lenient officers to be obeyed with discipline in his outfit during the war. As regards anything Arty or Crafty his attitude is merely appreciative--he is finishing up his last year of law at Columbia.
Johnny introduces Oliver and Ted to everybody but Peter--the three were classmates--shepherds his flock with a few disarmingly personal insults to prevent stiffness closing down again over the four that have already got to talking at the arrival of the two newcomers, and marshals them out to the terrace where they are to have dinner. Without seeming to try, he seats them so that Ted, Peter and Oliver will not form an offensive-defensive alliance against the three who are strangers to them by retailing New Haven anecdotes to each other for the puzzlement of the rest and starts the ball rolling with a neat provocative attack on romanticism in general and Cabell in particular.

II
"Johnny's strong for realism, aren't you, Johnny?"
"Well, yes, Ted, I am. I think 'Main Street' and 'Three Soldiers' are two of the best things that ever happened to America. You can say it's propaganda--maybe it is, but at any rate it's real. Honestly, I've gotten so tired, we all have, of all this stuff about the small Middle Western Town being the backbone of the country--"
"Backbone? Last vertebra!"
"As for 'Main Street,' it's--"
"It's the hardest book to read through without fallin' asleep where you sit, though, that I've struck since the time I had to repeat Geology." Peter smiles. "But, there, Johnny, I guess I'm the bone-head part of the readin' public--"
"That's why you're just the kind of person that ought to read books like that, Peter. The reading public in general likes candy laxatives, I'll admit--Old Nest stuff--but you--"
"'Nobody else will ever have to write the description of a small Middle Western Town'" quotes Oliver, discontentedly. "Well, who ever wanted to write the description of a small Middle Western Town?" and from Ricky French, selecting his words like flowers for a boutonniere.
"The trouble with 'Main Street' is not that it isn't the truth but that it