Page:Keeban (IA keeban00balm).pdf/75

 brown bean stalks and pickley delicatessen shops; nor was my world the usual dreary array of my own social sort,—those who have big homes on the Lake Shore Drive and on Astor Street and in Winnetka and Lake Forest; who have coveys of servants, of course, and put up a parade of cars and clubs and country places and everything else that looks impressive from outside but inside is duller than Deuteronomy.

They've pretty sets of silver and gold things about, naturally; and they've a good deal of platinum, too, with diamonds and rubies and sapphires and those green stones—oh, emeralds—stuck in. They've big bank accounts and a lot of other venal environment too tiresome to give you a thrill until you hear, all of a sudden, it has unduly tempted a gentleman from a stratum quite different but yet extremely adjacent to your own and the gentleman is likely to use some exceedingly direct, not to say personal, methods of getting your environment—and you.

For that was what Jerry's call meant. Win Scofield's name had crept to the top of somebody's board in the free society of the gentlemen—and their lady friends—of the "gat" and the "soup job," the "Hunk" and the