“What was the matter with the football team this season?”
“Let’s see, how many more years have you? What, only one more! Well, well, and I can remember you when you were that high, and used to come over to my house wearing a little green dress, with big mother-of-pearl buttons. You certainly were a cute little boy, and used to call our cook ‘Sna-sna.’ And here you are, almost a senior.”
“I can remember you when you were that high.”
“Oh, are you 1924? I wonder if you know a fellow named—er—Mellish—Spencer Mellish? I met him at the beach last summer. I am pretty sure that he is in your class—well, no, maybe it was 1918.”
After an hour or two of this Edgar is willing to go back to college and take an extra course in Blacksmithing, Chipping and Filing, given during the Christmas vacation, rather than run the risk of getting caught again. And, whichever way you look at it, whether he spends his time getting into and out of his evening clothes, or goes crazy answering questions and defending his mode of dress, it all adds up to the same in the end—fatigue and depletion and what the doctor would call “a general run-down nervous condition.”
The younger you are the more frayed you get. Little Wilbur comes home from school, where he has been put to bed at 8:30 every night with the rest of the fifth form boys: and has had to brush his hair in the presence of the head-master’s wife, and dives into what might be called a veritable maelstrom of activity. From a diet of cereal and fruit-whips, he is turned loose in the butler’s pantry among the maraschino cherries and given a free rein at the various children’s parties, where individual pound-cake Santas and brandied walnuts are followed by an afternoon at “Treasure Island,” with the result that he comes home and insists on tipping every one in the family the black spot and breaks the cheval glass when he is denied going to the six-day bicycle race at two in the morning.
Little girls do practically the same, and, if they are over fourteen, go back to school with the added burden of an affaire de coeur contracted during the recess. In general, it takes about a month or two of good, hard schooling and overstudy to put the child back on its feet after the Christmas rest at home.
