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latter, I soon discovered, were a contingent obligingly sent down from Cambridge at the request of my mother. They were all law students, classmates of William's son. I felt ashamed: my mother, scraping for guests and disquieted by the scarcity of a certain kind of young person, had appealed to William, who had in turn consulted with his son; and to this unimpeachable youth had been entrusted the delicate and infamous affair of collecting dancing partners for me (although I had so far attempted the floor only once, and then with the fat doctor who lived in the duplex below ours, and who had been called up to attend my mother: on his way out, jogging me toward the terrace in his minuet-like foxtrot, he confided his disapproval of all such festivities on the ground that they abused the health; also he warned me against contracting in my travels the Asiatic influenza which had recently spread to‹Genoa). For this hive of squires, lovers, boy friends, suitors—whatever my mother in her expectant fancies believed them to be—I was, it appeared, clearly indebted to the Harvard Law School. And the neophyte attorneys were easily distinguishable from the parasite poets. The attorneys were glabrous, ambitious, social, and grave, the poets mendacious, flagrantly seedy, thinly optimistic, and (worst of all) poetic. The two factions slyly prospected one another, leering face to face in a nook formed by the newly-built dais—in the lists, as it were—while the musicians, vying nearby but ignored, inexorably pursued their own dread list (they had just arrived at my mother's favorite military tunes). They were all of them yelling—the poets wildly and poetically, the musicians out of resentment for their buried grace notes, the girls in animal gratitude for the fray, the attorneys perforce.
    "What's it all about?" I asked one of the poets.
    "Oh, it's a fight," said one of the dancers.
    "There are idiots present," offered one of the law students in a politic tone.
    "Quite," said the poet, glaring. "And I wish they'd go back to Cambridge."
    "Don't be so charitable," interjected one of the frizzy-headed girls, who had taken the side of the poets, "Cambridge isn't hot enough."
    The embryonic lawyers were losing, outwitted by the nimble poets, who were becoming a little coarse in their style of speech: the poets were aggressively circular, intuitive, and periphrastic, whereas their opponents were logical and spoke in syllogisms—hence it was transparent that they would go down. It was less transparent what it was they would go down
for
—I could make out their cause only in part: in the indirect language of Constitutional Law (a second-year course, it developed), they sedately expressed a hope that the First Amendment might be re-amended in order to prevent the free and unhampered publication of verse pamphlets. I half agreed, for my mother's choice of poets was lamentable—she might better have determined to support a covey of vegetarians, whose dependency would be to a higher purpose and who would have eaten more cheaply in any case. The law students, on the other hand, were as wearisome a crew as ever entered Langdell Hall—one of their Cambridge buildings, apparently a temple of some sort, to which they never ceased referring, on account of the phantom presence in that place of their local divinity, Justice Holmes, whom they seemed to honor by having forgotten his decisions. Like my mother's versifiers, they showed no innocence of spirit. It was not merely that they were as worldly as profligates, but rather that they insisted on their own version of the world, exactly like the poets. I decided to abandon both camps—neither side had any originality. I thought them rank phonies. And so, because I was still in the dark about the meaning of their assaults, and to get away from the noise, I wandered into the kitchen.
    The refrigerator was disconnected—someone had removed the plug from the socket, and had inserted instead the