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“Terrible!”

“You’re helpful. Everybody is helpful. Say! What’s this new idea that it’s disgraceful to make your own living?”

“Don’t be a fool, Whit. Nobody thinks it’s disgraceful, but you don’t get this new current of thought in the Middle West that we gotta have art. ”

“Get it! Good heavens, I’ve got nothing else! I will say this for Paris—you can get away from people who believe in art just by going to the next caf. Maybe I’ll have to live there in order to be allowed to be an insurance agent!”

Stuyv Wescott was called to the telephone, and for three minutes Whit sat alone on the dock, looking across that clear, that candid, that sun-iced lake, round which hung silver birches and delicate willows and solid spruce. Here, Whit felt, was a place in which an American might find again, even in these days of eighty-story buildings and one-story manners, the courage of his forefathers.

A hell-diver, forever at his old game of pretending to be a duck, bobbed out of the mirror of the lake, and Whitney Dibble at last knew that he was a
t home.

And not so unlike the hell-diver in her quickness and imperturbable complexity, Betty Clark ran down from the road behind the Wescott bungalow and profoundly remarked, “Oh! Hello!”

“I’m going to be an insurance man,” remarked Whit.

“You’re going to be an artist!”

“Sure I am. As an insurance man!”

“You make me sick. ”

“Betty, my child, you have been away too long! It’s a year now, at least, since anyone—I mean anyone you could know—has said, ‘You make me sick!’”

“Oh—oh! You make me sick!”

T. Jefferson was extremely angry when Whit appeared for dinner. He said that Whit had no idea how he had offended the Opera Committee that afternoon. Consequently, Whit had to go through the gruesome ordeal of accompanying his father to an artistic reception in the evening. It was not until eleven that he could escape for a poker game in an obscure suite of the Hotel Thornleigh.

There were present here not only such raw collegians as Stuyv Wescott, Gil Scott, and Tim Clark, but also a couple of older and more hardened vulgarians, whereof one was a Mr. Seidel, who had made a million dollars by developing the new University Heights district of Zenith.

When they had played for two hours, they stopped for hot dogs; and Room Service was again drastically ordered to “hustle up with the White Rock and ice. ”

Mr. Seidel, glass in hand, grumbled: “So you’re an artist, Dibble? In Paris?”

“Yeah. ”

“And to think that a fella that could bluff me out of seven dollars on a pair of deuces should live over there, when he’d be an A-1 real-estate salesman. ”

“Are you offering me a job?”

“Well, I hadn’t thought about it…. Sure I am!”

“How much?”

“Twenty-five a week and commissions. ”

“It’s done. ”

And the revolution was effected, save for the voice of Stuyv Wescott, wailing, “Don’t do it, Whit! Don’t let these babies get you with their promise of millions!”

Whit had never altogether lost his awe of T. Jefferson and he was unable to dig up the courage to tell his father of his treachery in becoming American again until eleven of the morning, when he called upon him at his office.

“Well, well, my boy, it’s nice to see you!” said T. Jefferson. “I’m sorry that there is nothing really interesting for us to do today. But tomorrow noon we are going to a luncheon of the Bibliophile Club. ”

“That’s what I came to see you about, Dad. I’m sorry, but I shan’t be able to go tomorrow. I’ll be working. ”

“Working?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve taken a job with the Seidel Development Company. ”