election, the footrace, the baseball team, the Sunday School picnic, the
Fourth of July celebration, the dining room girls at the Palace Hotel,
the cross country circus and the trial of the occasional line fence
murder case--all were divertissements that engaged their passing young
attention.

If ever the world was an oyster for a youth the world of Harvey and the
fullness thereof was an oyster to Thomas Van Dorn. He had all that the
crude western community cherished: the prestige of money, family,
education, and that indefinable grace and courtesy of body and soul that
we call charm. And Harvey people seemed to be made for him. He liked
their candor, their strength, their crass materialism, their bray and
bluster, their vain protests of democracy and their unconscious regard
for his caste and culture. So whatever there was of egoism in his nature
grew unchecked by Harvey. He was the young lord of the manor. However
Harvey might hoot at his hat and gibe at his elided R's and mock his
rather elaborate manners behind his back; nevertheless he had his way
with the town and he knew that he was the master. While those about him
worked and worried Tom Van Dorn had but to rub lightly his lamp and the
slave appeared and served him. Naturally a young man of his conspicuous
talents in his exceedingly early twenties who has the vast misfortune to
have a lamp of Aladdin to rub, asks genii first of all for girls and
girls and more girls. Then incidentally he asks for business and perhaps
for politics and may be as an afterthought and for his own comfort he
may pray for the good will of his fellows. Tom Van Dorn became known in
the vernacular as a "ladies man." It did not hurt his reputation as a
lawyer, for he was young and youth is supposed to have its follies so
long as its follies are mere follies. No one in that day hinted that Tom
Van Dorn was anything more dangerous than a butterfly. So he flitted
from girl to girl, from love affair to love affair, from heart to heart
in his gay clothes with his gay manners and his merry face. And men
smiled and women and girls whispered and boys hooted and all the world
gave the young lord his way. But when he included the dining room girls
at the Palace Hotel in his list of conquests, Dr. Nesbit began squinting
seriously at the youth and, late at night coming from his professional
visits, when the doctor passed the young fellow returning from some
humble home down near the river, the Doctor w