en, by way of
variety, he went North and polished brass in the Brooklyn Navy-yard
for a year.

When the war was over he came home, He was twenty-one, has trousers
were too short and too tight. His buttoned shoes were long and narrow.
His tie was an alarming conspiracy of purple and pink marvellously
scrolled, and over it were two blue eyes faded like a piece of very
good old cloth, long exposed to the sun.

In the twilight of one April evening when a soft gray had drifted down
along the cottonfields and over the sultry town, he was a vague figure
leaning against a board fence, whistling and gazing at the moon's rim
above the lights of Jackson Street. His mind was working persistently
on a problem that had held his attention for an hour. The Jelly-bean had
been invited to a party.

Back in the days when all the boys had detested all the girls, Clark
Darrow and Jim had sat side by side in school. But, while Jim's social
aspirations had died in the oily air of the garage, Clark had
alternately fallen in and out of love, gone to college, taken to
drink, given it up, and, in short, become one of the best beaux of the
town. Nevertheless Clark and Jim had retained a friendship that,
though casual, was perfectly definite. That afternoon Clark's ancient
Ford had slowed up beside Jim, who was on the sidewalk and, out of a
clear sky, Clark invited him to a party at the country club. The
impulse that made him do this was no stranger than the impulse which
made Jim accept. The latter was probably an unconscious ennui, a
half-frightened sense of adventure. And now Jim was soberly thinking
it over.

He began to sing, drumming his long foot idly on a stone block in the
sidewalk till it wobbled up and down in time to the low throaty tune:

"One smile from Home in Jelly-bean town,
Lives Jeanne, the Jelly-bean Queen.
She loves her dice and treats 'em nice;
No dice would treat her mean."

He broke off and agitated the sidewalk to a bumpy gallop.

"Daggone!" he muttered, half aloud. They would all be there--the old
crowd, the crowd to which, by right of the white house, sold long
since, and the portrait of the officer in gray over the mantel, Jim
should have belonged. But that crowd had grown up together into a
tight little set as gradually as the girls' dresses had lengthened
inch by inch, as definitely as the boys' trousers had dropped suddenly
to their ankles. And to that society of first names and dead puppy
loves