Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/204

 chapel. I see another, stepping—without vine leaves—into the open shaft of an elevator; no god bears him up. I see other youths of the better sort in large numbers in a smoke-heavy place of midnight refreshment, after a football victory, treating to hot whiskey weary-looking painted girls in black—Stephen Phillips's 'disillusioned women sipping fire.' I see five professional men on a moral holiday, seriously approaching the task of consuming three quarts of Scotch and Bourbon before morning. I see groggy alumni embracing one another in tears, hugely pleased to be drunk with men to whom they never speak when they are sober. I see derelict artists and novelists and lawyers, quietly slipping away from professional life to settle down in a rustic hermitage to drink themselves to death. I see a group of permanent class-secretaries in secret session, running through the long list of alumni in every college who never report and never turn up; the secretaries know why, but they publish no report."

"Good heavens, Professor," groaned Willys, "His Excellency and I were not born yesterday, and doubtless even our hostess knows there are some casualties. Whiskey isn't buttermilk. Knives have edges, and are dangerous. Every-