Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/27

 where there would be no baseball. It hardly seemed right, but there it was.

Not very long afterward—possibly a year—there had taken place a change in his small world, a tremendous Cinderella sort of change. He and his mother moved from a little house in Pennsylvania to a great house in northern New Jersey, and had many servants to wait upon them and many motor cars in which to ride. He was young enough at the time to take this quite for granted. The things that happened to you that were not good were the things you asked questions about; the things that were good spoke for themselves. Besides, the new home came soon to be to him merely a stopping-off place between seasons. He spent his summers at a camp beside a birch-shored lake, where he lived in a tent with ten other boys, and swam three times a day, and was sunburned a dusky gold, and worshiped his counselor because he played end for Dartmouth. In the winter he attended a boarding-school in Massachusetts, quite a famous boarding-school with ivy-clad buildings and ancient traditions. Here he mingled with the sons of the great and of the merely wealthy, and through them became acquainted with divers things not mentioned in the curriculum—notably slang, Latin trots, risqué jokes, profanity, hair-slickum, salacious literature, and the hitherto quite unsuspected importance of the opposite sex.

In due time he graduated, and went to a certain University, where he spent a bewildered first year, a rather uproarious second, and a busy third. ..

Surely there had been little in these twenty-two years of living to cause Jock to differ from other young men. And unless you were a keen analyst you probably would not have perceived that he did differ, for he concealed it well under the mask he wore before the world. Out-