ip into literary
composition. He studied when he might better have been at play, and he
kept up his diary under a student lamp into all hours of the night. He
had been reading lately about Paris, and he was piecing out the
elementary instruction of the Academy by getting together a collection
of French grammars and dictionaries. He had about decided that sometime
he would go to live on that island in the Seine near Notre Dame.

His father told him he was working too hard and too late--that it would
hurt his health and probably injure his eyes. His mother made no comment
and gave no advice. She was an invalid and thus had absorbing interests
of her own. Raymond kept on reading and writing.

Perhaps I should begin to sketch, just about here, his awakening regard
for some Gertrude or Adele, and his young rivalry with Johnny McComas
for her favor; telling how Johnny won over Raymond the privilege of
carrying her books to school, and how, in the end, he won Gertrude or
Adele herself from Raymond, and married her. Fiddlesticks! Please put
all such conventional procedures out of your head, and take what I am
prepared to give you. The school was a boys' school. There was no
Gertrude or Adele--as yet--any more than there was an Elsie. Raymond
kept to his books and indulged in no juvenile philanderings. Forget all
such foolish stereotypings of fancy.

As for the romance and the rivalry: when that came, it came with a vast
difference.

IV

Jehiel Prince was a capitalist. So was James: a capitalist, and the son
of a capitalist. They had some interests in common, and others apart.
There was a bank, and there were several large downtown business-blocks
whose tenants required a lot of bookkeeping, and there was a horse-car
line. There was a bus-line, too, between the railroad depots and the
hotels. James destined Raymond for the bank. He would hardly go to
college, but at seventeen or so would begin on the collection-register
or some such matter; later he might come to be a receiving-teller;
pretty soon he might rise to an apprehension of banking as a science
and have a line as an official in the _Bankers' Gazette_. Beyond that he
might go as far as he was able. James thought that, thus favored in
early years, the boy might go far.

But Raymond had just taken on Rome, and was finding it even more
interesting than Paris. The Academy's professor of ancient history began
to regard him as a prodigy. Then, somehow or other, Raymon