had a tutor and did not go to school with
the other chaps. In the eyes of the world I was looked upon as a lucky
fellow, but I know now what I have missed. In these days I am rubbing
elbows with fellows who have had to hustle, and I am discovering that
life is a great game, and that I have missed the game. If Dad had been
different, he might have pushed me into things, as some men with money
push their sons, making them stand on their own feet. But Dad liked an
easy life, and he was perhaps entitled to ease, for he had struggled in
his younger years. But I have never struggled. I have always had
somebody to brush my clothes and to bring my breakfast, and I think I
have had a sort of hazy idea that life was like that for everybody--or
if it wasn't, then the people who couldn't be brushed and breakfasted
by others were much to be pitied.

"Oh, I've been a Tin Soldier, Jean-Joan, left out not only of the war
but of life. I've been on the shelf all these years in our big house,
with the wooden trumpets blowing, 'Trutter-a-trutt' while other men
have striven.

"When I first came here I had a sort of detached feeling. I had no
experiences to match with the experiences of other men. I had never
had to rush in the morning to catch a subway, I had never eaten, to put
it poetically, by candlelight, so that I might get to the store by
eight. I had never sold papers, or plowed fields, or stood behind a
counter. I had never sat at a desk, I had never in fact done anything
really useful, I had just been rich, and that isn't much of a
background as I am beginning to see it here--.

"I find myself having a rather strange feeling of exaltation as the
days go by, because for the first time I am a cog in a great machine,
for the first time I am toiling and sweating as I rather think it was
intended that men should toil and sweat. And the friends that I am
making are the sign and seal of the levelling effects of this great
war. Not one of the men of what you might call my own class interests
me half as much as Tommy Tracy, who before he entered the service drove
the car of one of Dad's business associates. I have often ridden
behind Tommy, but he doesn't know it. And I don't intend that he
shall. He rather fancies that I am a scholarly chap torn from my
books, and he patronizes me on the strength of his knowledge of
practical things.

"Tommy likes to eat, and he talks a great deal about his mother's
cooking. He says t