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He danced that night with many girls.

He saw Betty Clark only now and then, and from afar. And the less he saw of her, the more important it seemed to him that she should take him seriously.

There had been a time when Whit had each morning heard the good, noisy, indignant call of T. Jefferson demanding, “Are you going to get up or ain’t you going to get up? Hey! Whit! If you don’t wanna come down for breakfast, you ain’t gonna have any breakfast!”

Indeed it slightly disturbed him, when he awoke at eleven of the morning, to find there had been no such splendid, infuriating, decent uproar from T. Jefferson.

He crawled out of bed and descended the stairs. In the lower hall he found his mother.

(It is unfortunate that in this earnest report of the turning of males in the United States of America toward culture, it is not possible to give any great attention to Mrs. T. Jefferson Dibble. Aside from the fact that she was a woman, kindly and rather beautiful, she has no existence here except as the wife of T. Jefferson and the mother of Whitney. )

“Oh, Whit! Dear! I do hope your father won’t be angry! He waited such a long while for you. But I am so glad, dearie, that he understands, at last, that possibly you may have just as much to do with all this Painting and Art and so on as he has! … But I mean to say: Your father is expecting you to join him at three this afternoon for the meeting of the Finnish Opera Furtherance Association. Oh, I guess it will be awfully interesting—it will be at the Thornleigh. Oh, Whit, dear, it’s lovely to have you back!”

The meeting of the Finnish Opera Furtherance Association at the Hotel Thornleigh was interesting.

It was more than interesting.

Mrs. Montgomery Zeiss said that the Finns put it all over the Germans and Italians at giving a real modernistic version of opera.

Mr. T. Jefferson Dibble said that as his son, Whitney, had been so fortunate as to obtain a rather authoritative knowledge of European music, he (Whitney) would now explain everything to them.

After a lot of explanation about how artistic opera was, and how unquestionably artistic Zenith was, Whit muttered that he had to beat it. And while T. Jefferson stared at him with a sorrowful face, Whit fled the room.

At five o’clock Whit was sitting on the dock of Stuyv Wescott’s bungalow on Lake Kennepoose, muttering, “Look, Stuyv, have you got a real job?”

“Yeah, I guess you’d call it a job. ”

“D’you mind telling me what you are making a year now?”

“About three thou. I guess I’ll make six in a coupla years. ”

“Hm! I’d like to make some money. By the way—it just occurs to me, and I hope that I am not being too rude in asking—what ARE you doing?”

“I am an insurance agent,” remarked Stuyv with a melancholy dignity.

“And you’re already making three thousand dollars a year?”

“Yeah, something like that. ”

“I think I ought to be making some money. It’s funny. In Europe it’s the smart thing to live on money that somebody else made for you. I don’t know whether it’s good or bad, but fact is, somehow, most Americans feel lazy, feel useless, if they don’t make their own money.

“Prob’ly the Europeans are right. Prob’ly it’s because we’re restless. But anyway, I’ll be hanged if I’m going to live on the Old Man the rest of my life and pretend I’m a painter! The which I ain’t! Listen, Stuyv! D’yuh think I’d make a good insurance man?”