was dressed in the height of fashion. He wondered frequently how she managed to do it on the salary he paid her. She had an air of assurance, the bearing of one who knows what the slang users call "her vegetables." In short it was hard to fuss her with any question. Cautious knew that she had been out of college about two years.

ity, even when I was in high school. And I wanted to go to dances and have dates—you know. All the things that go with college life. The dean of women was an old crab. She was all the time telling us we should wear more clothes, that sort of thing you know; but in spite of the dean we managed to keep awake. wouldn't have missed college for anything."

I

"What did you do after you were graduated?" suggested Cautious.

"It's college," Cautious hastened to add, a little nervous. "I'm curious to know what you got out of college." The girl regarded him with a level gaze, that look of calm contemplation so many girls have a look that just escapes being impudent.

"If you'll excuse the expression," said Miss Winsome, "what I got out of college was one decidedly swell time. I had pretty good 'hours' all the four years I was there. Some of the classes were a bore, of course, and you know how it is with some of the professors. They gripe a lot if you aren't showing a disposition to plug for an A-plus. But most of them were human. It didn't make much difference whether we flunked or not, because we never intended doing anything with the stuff after we got away from there."

"But why did you go?" demanded Cautious.

"Oh," and Miss Winsome's eyes were round with surprise as if everybody didn't know-"I went to have a good time. I always wanted to make a good college soror

"Why I thought you knew that," Miss Winsome answered. "I thought

that I took a business course after I got out of college. I learned stenography and typewriting, and you gave me this job. Isn't my work satisfactory?"

"Your work is eminently satisfactory," Cautious admitted. "I was just going outside business matters for a moment or two, and after all it was none of my business; but I wanted to get your your reaction on higher education for women."

"Well, all I've got to say," said Miss Winsome, "is that a girl's a fool if she doesn't go to college, that is if she has the chance. Of course I wouldn't go and work my way through, the way some of the bookworms do. I guess they want to teach, though; and they can't get a license in this State any more unless they've got college degrees to dangle in front of the township trustees and the members of the schoolboards. I wouldn't go to a girls' school on a bet; but if I had it all to do over again, I'd go right back to the old school, and maybe have a better time than I had before. They say the new crop of fellows are more

fun than the crowd we had when I was there. I'm twenty-two now and they think I have one foot in the grave; but I put on some extra rouge and lip-stick one night last week, shortened my skirt a little and went down to a college dance. They're pretty hot down there now. I don't approve of all the things they do, because it seems so kiddish, if you get what I mean. All this hip-flask stuff you know. But they like it, and if they don't get hold of the wrong stuff I guess it won't kill any of them. I could have been tight a dozen times if I hadn't been off the stuff."

219

Later in the day Mr. Cautious called in Ralph Newcomer, the "dashing young salesman" who was making such a splendid record with the Old Orchard addition, about two miles east of Midwestia.

Newcomer had been with them a year. He had an air about him. The way he combed his hair straight back was copied by all the younger salesmen; but none of them could do it just the same way. He had good manners, an air of deference for those who were ten, fifteen or twenty years older. He wore a fraternity pin on the left side of his waistcoat. He had gone through the period of letting his socks sag around his ankles, and was now sufficiently mature to begin wearing garters again. The 'coonskin coat he acquired during his senior year, however, was still doing service.

Cautious and Newcomer talked about their plans for the Old Orchard campaign. They looked over some new prospects and discussed the best manner of approach. Then

Cautious asked the question about college. Why had Newcomer gone?

"Well, Mr. Cautious, everybody goes," said Newcomer. "It's just a thing that everybody does, you know. That is, if they belong in the slightest degree. Of course I came in contact with men in college who were there for some serious purpose and who took no part whatever in undergraduate life. They never were spiked for a spiked for a frat, they never went out for athletics. They never did anything but study. You hardly ever hear of those fellows in after life. Some of them make a name as scientists, but most of them become country school-teachers with the hope that some day a little high school will call them to be principal. Those of us who went all the gaits, had a good time, made friends and the like, got the most out of college. I don't know that I'm using anything I learned, when it comes to selling lots, but I can quote a trifle, now and then, that seems to impress a prospect. I sold a lot to an old fraternity brother the other day, and I doubt if I could have interested him at all if I hadn't told some good old frat stories, before I showed him the plat. You see, a man simply has to get the polish a college gives him or he gets nowhere in our modern. world. By the way, Mr. Cautious, what was your school?"

"I never went to college," said Cautious, in the solemn manner of a judge pronouncing a life sentence.

Newcomer spluttered, and apologized. He would tell the outside office, a little later, that he had "pulled a boner." Cautious, however, put him at his ease, took the conversation away from him and

That night Cautious went over to one of the neighbor's and listened to the radio. There was a college hour during which a quartet sang the classics made famous by various universities and colleges in his own and other States. He thrilled to "On Wisconsin" and he fought the good fight for Illinois. There was a tingling at the base of his spine, or his brain, or somewhere when the quartet sang about Indiana, Michigan, Notre Dame, Yale, Harvard, Cornell and all the others. Later in the evening he heard the broadcast of a basket-ball game. Two of the men present had attended the rival schools and they wagered high before the game was ten minutes old. It suddenly came to him that the radio was broadcasting a lot of college stuff. True enough, some of the programs were sponsored by business houses that wanted to sell "kollege kut klothes." Over his own radio he had been hearing college songs that insisted, irresistibly, that he irresistibly, that he hum or whistle them. He had a vague sensation that he had gone to all these schools and had played on their teams, or else had been a member of their glee clubs.

"Come go down to Freshwater with me to-morrow," said Henry Hunt to Cautious, on the street the next day. "My class is having its reunion. It's the day before commencement, you know. Big time and everything. You went there didn't you?"

"No," said Mr. Cautious, "I never went to college."

"Oh, excuse me," said Hunt, as one who has made a social error. "I

Freshwater had sent its band up to Midwestia to help advertise the school. More than a hundred young men, every one a musician, poured into the street. They made an imposing spectacle, each dressed in close fitting blue with red piping. The sun shone and glistened on the big horns. There was a bass drum so large that it was propelled on a sort of cart, with one boy to push, another to pull and the drummer beating as he walked along. A drummajor wearing the traditional bearskin hat strutted in front, whirling his baton. A whistle blew, the snaredrums rolled, the bass drum and the cymbals crashed and there came a blend of melody and music, a blend of something so tremendously inspiring that George H. Cautious, as he stood there at the curbing, felt it down to his very vitals. All the radio programs came back to him and for a second he tried to identify the thing. But of course it was Freshwater's song a marching song with a swing that had been written in by a musician who knew not only how to write music but how to inspire the multitude as well. All around Cautious there were men who took off their hats. He knew them as Freshwater men. To them this tune was the same as the National Anthem. Something in fact that touched them more deeply than the Star Spangled Banner. He reached for his own hat by instinct, felt the red of confusion rush to his face and jerked his hand down again. Just for a second he

had lived the four years this song represented. Just for a fraction of time he had been singing with the seniors under the elms, or with the freshmen under the spreading chestnuts. He had worn a green cap through his first year. He had gone through the rigors of initiation and had won his frat pin as hundreds had won theirs before him. He had signed a note pledging himself to help build the new stadium-without any thought of where the money would be earned he had held close in his arms a girl who gazed up at him and gave his hand a little squeeze. She was the girl to whom he would give his frat pin to-morrow night. Yes, he had held her as they waltzed to Jasper's Jazzomaniacs during the last dance on the Junior Prom program.

These were his instant reactions. These thoughts went through his fuddled brain as the Freshwater band crashed into the trio of its stately and moving march. These vagrant longings represented the things he had yearned for and missed. They represented the richness of experience that had come to those who matriculated, if they never did anything else. George H. Cautious lifted his hand and placed it carefully in the side pocket of his coat, where it would be away from temptation. Around him, men still stood uncovered out of respect to Freshwater, its song, its faculty, its traditions, its place in the sun. So near that he caught the spirit and yet so far that he might have been in another world, stood George Cautious, watching the band march up

the street. the street. He pulled his hat a little firmer on his head, squared his shoulders and started in the direction of his office. A block away now the Freshwater band brought its anthem to a glorious climax. To Cautious something about the last strain seemed to be translated into words that flared across the sky. Some men say the thing boastfully, others admit it humbly, with an empty feeling that nothing can fill. George Cautious whispered it to himself as he walked among his fellows, whispered it as a sort of funeral chant.

"I never went to college," he mused, "I never went to col-lege. I never went, I never went, I never went to college. I never went to— Oh, hello there, Billy, how's the boy?"

"Some band, that," declared Billy Thornton as he nodded in the direction of the Freshwater aggregation. "You know they took that band East with the football team last season and after it marched on the field, spelled a lot of names and went through some difficult evolutionsplaying that darn old college hymn all the time-well, after that a hardnosed press telegrapher, up in the coop, got sort of weepy eyed and said 'that damned band would make me go to war again.' Nobody could boil a greater tribute into shorter form than that."

"Huh," snorted George Cautious. "A fife and drum will make a man go to war, but a band like that—a band like that will make a man go to college, or wish to his dying day that he had gone!"

Η H'I

E lived next door to us when I was a girl-old Mr. Parline. To be sure, his wife lived there too, but we never saw very much of her. She was one of the immaculate housewives of that day, whose life was bounded by the hundred small tasks of a home into which the modern, button-pushing conveniences had not come. A shy, effacing woman she was-"mousy" describes her too well to abandon the term for its mere triteness. Mr. Parline was the one who did the talking, who neighbored with the rest of us, who came to the back door bringing us gifts from his garden.

The Parline house sat in the midst of trees and flowers like Ceres among her fruits. We were just then emerging from the dark age of fences into the enlightened era of open lawns. By your fenced or fenceless condition you were known as old-fashioned or up-to-date. One by one, the picket and the fancy iron and the rough board fences on our street had gone down before the god of Fashion. Mr. Parline, alone, retained his a neat picket, painted as white as the snowballs that hung over it, Julietlike, from their green foliage balconies.

The shrubbery was not so artistically placed as that of to-day. We

had not learned to group it against houses and walls, leaving wide stretches of lawn. Single bushes dotted Mr. Parline's lawn, a hydrangea here, a peony there, a tigerlily beyond, in spaded spots of brown, mulch-filled earth, like so many chickens squatting in their round

nests.

The Parlines were of English extraction although both had been born in Vermont. There was a faintly whispered tale that they were cousins, but there was no one so intimate as to verify the gossip, and no one so prying as to ask.

Mr. Parline was a half head shorter than his tall, slender wife. He was stocky of body, a little ruddy as to complexion, like the color of his apples, a little fuzzy as to face, like the down on his peaches. There was a quiet dignity about him that fell just short of pompousness. "Mr. Parline" his wife called him, in contrast to the "John" and "Silas" and "Fred" with which the other women spoke of their liege lords. Where other women in the block ran in to our home with the freedom of close acquaintances, Mrs. Parline alone occasionally came sedately in at the front gate in a neat brown dress covered with a large snowy apron starched to cardboard stiffness.