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proud of the two inches I had grown, and of the blue spot on my lip, where I had begun to shave. But she seemed anxious to get away, and I thought it funny she said nothing about coming over to make peach ice cream, which she had cooked and I had cranked. Next day I found out she had met another lady, and was going to open a studio with her in New York. She wrote me for years and I wrote her, and she didn’t drop out of my life. But she wasn’t in it either, and it would come over me all the time, the loneliness I had felt the day I beat up Anderson. I didn’t mope off by myself, it was nothing like that. I went around with guys and played on the high-school basketball team and got moved from forward to center on account of the way I was shooting up all the time, and studied a little. Anyhow, I got A in math and physics and mechanics, and C in English and French and Sociology. But I got D in deportment on account of the fights I got into, which was the tip-off on how I was enjoying life.
    It didn’t help any, the Old Man’s idea of how to get me interested in the serious side of life, on the basis of what we were going to do with the music money. I hadn’t paid much attention to it, that I remember now, except to do what Miss Eleanor had said do, which was to put most of it, around $4,500, in a savings account, and try to spend as little of the rest as possible. But when the end of the summer came around, and all the stores advertised sales on suits, it seemed a good idea I should buy one. There was nothing very new about it, as I’d already bought one, the one I wore to Margaret’s german, my first with long pants, back in the spring, so it wasn’t as though I was starting a one-guy revolution. But when I found a number I liked pretty well, a pin-striped, double-breasted blue in the window at the Hub, with fedora hat, malacca stick, and two-toned, suede-topped shoes to go with it, all exactly like the signed picture of Antonio Scotti that Miss Eleanor had had on the piano, you’d have thought I had set the garage on fire or something. Sheila wept and tore her hair and said I looked like “lower Broadway,” whatever that was. Nancy said I certainly had fallen under “peculiar influences.” And it was all the worse, from the standpoint of crossing me up, because the suit had had one effect of a most desirable kind, before they even saw it. I wore it home, of course, but took the car that ran near Miss Deets’s house to check with Denny on what we were doing that night, or anyhow that’s what I made out I was stopping by for. Mainly it was to let him get a load of the dazzola-dizzola, and it certainly worked. Since the flop at Camden he had been getting familiar again, marching right beside me, catching in step. But the suit did it. I didn’t advertise it, didn’t even remember it. I just asked if he could make it the late show that night, instead of the first, as there were things I had to do after dinner. He nodded and didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. I could tell by the look in his eye.
    So when I ran into this bawling out on Mt. Royal Terrace I felt like a typographical error. But so far as my father was concerned, nothing came of it that night, or the next, or for a month or two. It wasn’t till the cold weather hit, and Miss Eleanor had left for New York, and Denny for Frederick, that I was invited in the den one Saturday afternoon, just after lunch, and just before I was due to shove off for a football game. “Jack, I think you need a new coat.”
    “I’m going to get one.”
    “I’ll get it. I—had intended to.”
    “I can get it. I’ve got money.”
    “I think it my duty to clothe you yet, whether you’ve been fortunate about money or not. And, as to attire, you might be guided by older persons’ advice. On taste, suitability, such things. I—can’t say the latest acquisition impresses me a great deal.”
    “You mean my suit?”
    “Aye—and accessories.”
    “What’s the