Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/203

 "Something right?"

"Right?" said Gregg, almost impatiently. "What in the devil is right?" He did not reply to himself for a moment; he had turned away from the glow of the city; glancing toward the university buildings, he found that they had come opposite the dormitories where lighted windows proclaimed the rooms where boys were studying or gathered in groups, talking. "There's where they're bickering about what constitutes right—between friendly little arguments on the prize fight and baseball schedule," Gregg said. "Anyway, that's the way we used to do in the Phi Kap house of the U. of M. Only it's a little early in the evening now; about midnight, when you're lying about in some other fellow's room, is when you really get worked up about philosophy and such. There's usually a theoretical Buddhist in the bunch and, before the war, you could count upon at least one German rationalist; then of course there was Bill with good sound ideas—we'd have a pretty competent discussion winding up, usually, with a rather general feeling that there wasn't much right—absolute right, I believe the professor's word was—but that what was the greatest good for the greatest number was right; and if that wasn't right, there wasn't any use bucking it; for it was going to happen. So cities are all right, Marjorie; they have to be; they're happening everywhere. And the way we're beginning to live in them must be right, for we're most of us coming to live that way. But I know a little how you feel; I felt some of it myself that night down at Clearedge Street.

"It seemed to me for a while that everything about there was rotten—married people and all, Marjorie; it seemed to me they were all rotters and quitters and