Raymond
was in the bank, and ignorant of the further fact that one of our
fellows was just beginning to be a salesman in a bond house. Johnny
became violently communicative about the attractions of Dellwood Park
and seemed to want to figure demonstratively in the eyes of Gertrude and
Adele as an up-and-coming paladin of the business world. To most of us
he seemed too self-assertive, too self-assured. He knew too clearly what
he wanted, and showed it too clearly. Indeed it became apparent to me
that while a boy of twelve may be accepted easily (at least in an early,
simple society), a youth of eighteen cannot altogether escape the issues
of caste. It was borne in on me presently that Johnny might as well have
remained away. In fact--

"We shan't need him again," said the brother of the soprano to me, as
the evening broke up.

And Raymond himself remarked to me a day later:--

"Don't push him; he'll get along without your help."

IV

While the rankness of new elements in a new era had not penetrated our
homes, it had begun to make itself manifest in public places. The town,
within sixty years, had risen from a population of nearly _nil_ to a
population of some five or six hundred thousand; and it was only in due
course, perhaps, that "vice" now raised its head and that a "criminal
class" came into effective, unabashed functioning. It was to be many
years before the better elements learned how to combine for an efficient
opposition to impudent evils. A heterogeneous populace, newly arrived,
was still willing to elect mayors of native blood; but one of these,
elected and reelected to the town's lasting harm, might as well have
been of the newer, and wholly exterior, tradition: a genial,
loose-lipped demagogue who saw an opportunity to weld the miscellany of
discrepant elements into a compact engine for the furtherance of his own
coarse ambitions, and who allowed his supporters such a measure of
license as was needed to make their support continuing. A shameless new
quarter suddenly obtruded itself with an ugly emphasis; unclassifiables,
male and female, began to assert and disport themselves more daringly
than dreamt of heretofore; and many good citizens who would crowd the
town forward to a population of a million and to a status undeniably
metropolitan came to stroll these tawdry, noisy new streets with a
curiosity of mind at once disturbed, titillated, and somehow gratified.
Said some: "This is a new thing; do w