yhood.) At any rate, the Y.M.C.A. young men were too juvenile for me,
too unsophisticated. This I would not have minded, could they have met
me and helped me mentally. But I had got more out of the books than
they. Their meagre physical experiences, plus their meagre intellectual
experiences, made a negative sum so vast that it overbalanced their
wholesome morality and healthful sports.

In short, I couldn't play with the pupils of a lower grade. All the
clean splendid young life that was theirs was denied me--thanks to my
earlier tutelage under John Barleycorn. I knew too much too young. And
yet, in the good time coming when alcohol is eliminated from the needs
and the institutions of men, it will be the Y.M.C.A., and similar
unthinkably better and wiser and more virile congregating-places, that
will receive the men who now go to saloons to find themselves and one
another. In the meantime, we live to-day, here and now, and we discuss
to-day, here and now.

I was working ten hours a day in the jute mills. It was hum-drum machine
toil. I wanted life. I wanted to realise myself in other ways than at a
machine for ten cents an hour. And yet I had had my fill of saloons. I
wanted something new. I was growing up. I was developing unguessed and
troubling potencies and proclivities. And at this very stage,
fortunately, I met Louis Shattuck and we became chums.

Louis Shattuck, without one vicious trait, was a real innocently devilish
young fellow, who was quite convinced that he was a sophisticated town
boy. And I wasn't a town boy at all. Louis was handsome, and graceful,
and filled with love for the girls. With him it was an exciting and
all-absorbing pursuit. I didn't know anything about girls. I had been
too busy being a man. This was an entirely new phase of existence which
had escaped me. And when I saw Louis say good-bye to me, raise his hat
to a girl of his acquaintance, and walk on with her side by side down the
sidewalk, I was made excited and envious. I, too, wanted to play this
game.

"Well, there's only one thing to do," said Louis, "and that is, you must
get a girl."

Which is more difficult than it sounds. Let me show you, at the expense
of a slight going aside. Louis did not know girls in their home life.
He had the entree to no girl's home. And of course, I, a stranger in
this new world, was similarly circumstanced. But, further, Louis and I
were unable to go to dancing-schools