diversions. He wore clothes well and became president of the Imperial
Dancing Club--chiefly to please his girl, who desired social position. A
boy with twelve dollars a week in a country town, who will spend a
dollar or two a month to have his clothes pressed, can accomplish any
social heights which rise before him, and there is no barrier in our
town to a girl merely because she presides at the ribbon-counter; which,
of course, is as it should be.

So David became a town personage. When the linotype operator left, we
gave David the place. Now he courted only one of his sweethearts by
night, and found time for other things. Also we gave him three dollars
a week more to spend, and the Imperial Club got most of it--generally
through the medium of the blonde in the Racket Store, who was
cultivating a taste for diamonds, and liked to wear flowers at the more
formal dances.

Now, unless they are about to be married, a boy of twenty may not call
on a girl of nineteen in a respectable family, a member of the Plymouth
Daughters, and a graduate of the High School, oftener than four nights
in the week, without exciting more or less neighbourly comment; but
David and the girl were merely going together--as the parlance of our
town has it--and though they were engaged they had no idea of getting
married at any definite time. David thus had three nights in the seven
which might be called open. The big press would not receive him by
night, and he spent his love on his linotype by day; so he was lonesome
and longed for the society of his kind. The billiard-hall did not tempt
him; but at the cigar-store he met and fell under the spell of Henry
Larmy--known of the town as "Old Hen," though he was not two score years
gone--and the two began chumming together.

"Old Hen" worked in a tin-shop, read Ruskin, regarded Debs as a prophet,
received many papers devoted to socialism and the New Thought, and
believed that he believed in no man, no God and no devil. Also he was a
woman-hater, and though he never turned his head for a petticoat,
preached free-love and bought many books which promised to tell him how
to become a hypnotist. At various times, Larmy's category of beliefs
included the single-tax, Buddhism, spiritualism, and a faith in the
curative properties of blue glass. David and Henry Larmy would sit in
the office of evenings discussing these things when honest people should
be in bed.

Henry never could tell us just how the tal