Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/187

 training camp. By quick thinking, clear speaking, straight standing and uncritical acceptance of orders given, he won a commission as lieutenant of artillery only to find himself fated, for his efficiency in imparting mechanical details to others, to remain on this side training successive drafts. At the end of the war and upon his release from service, he had decided against reëntering the university. He had not gone to college for the sake of instruction, and he never had considered a college course as having the least bearing upon the real business of life, except as it made him friends. He had gone to Yale to be able to speak of himself as a Yale man, and having won that prerogative and having ended his course for an honorable reason, he had entered his father's office at a most interesting and profitable time. For the Cullens dealt in raw materials, and there never was a time when raw materials were so demanded and when they commanded such prices.

It made Bennet particularly tired, when the government by its absurd taxes and labor by its outrageous demands were making it as hard as possible for his father and himself to do business, to have Ethel come along and turn up the family trouble again and perhaps start something she couldn't stop. As she had got herself into such a riot with grandfather that she wouldn't even go to his father's home, he'd take her out to dinner.

Ethel was willing to go; indeed, when she thought it over, she preferred to talk to Bennet in some public place rather than at his father's home or here at the house on Scott Street. Bennet and she had got along well largely because, from childhood, they had been frank with each other. She wanted to tell him fairly