you report here at six o'clock sharp." Then I went and
hunted up Allie and for once we let business go hang in business hours.
We couldn't work. We kept clawing for the solid ground and trying to
readjust society and the universe and the beacon lights of progress all
afternoon.

When quitting time came we waited for Jarvis. We didn't say anything,
but we loaded him into a cab and took him up to the old cafe. Then he
told us his story, while we learned a lot of things about glory we
hadn't even vaguely suspected before. He was one of the greatest
football players who ever carried a ball, Jarvis was. Of that there was
no doubt. He admitted it himself then. I might say he confessed it. He'd
come to his university without any real preparation--you know even in
the best regulated institutions of learning they sometimes get your
marks on tackling mixed with your grades on entrance algebra. He'd spent
two hours a day on football and the rest of his time being a college
hero. He'd had to work at it like a dog, he said. How he got by the
exams, he never knew. It seemed to him as if he must have studied in his
sleep. By the time he graduated he'd had about every honor that has been
invented for campus consumption. He belonged to the exclusive
societies. All kinds of big people had shaken hands with him--asked for
the privilege. He had a scrapbook of newspaper stories about his career
that weighed four pounds. He knew the differences between eight kinds of
wine by the taste and he had a perfect education in forkology,
waltzology, necktiematics, and all the other branches of social science.

He would never forget, he said, how he felt when he was graduated and
the university moved off behind him and left him alone. It was up to him
to keep on being a famous character, he felt. His college demanded it.
He had to make good. But there he was with a magnificent football
education and no more football to play. His financial training consisted
in knowing when his bank account was overdrawn. His folks had pretty
nearly paralyzed themselves putting him through and he wasn't going to
draw on them any further. He went to New York because it seemed to be
almost as big as the university, and he started all alone on the job of
shouldering his way past the captains of finance up to the place where
his college mates might feel proud of him some more.

The result was so ridiculous that he had to laugh at it himself. He lost
five yards every tim