Dalyrimple Goes Wrong

In the millennium an educational genius will write a book to be
given to every young man on the date of his disillusion. This
work will have the flavor of Montaigne's essays and Samuel
Butler's note-books--and a little of Tolstoi and Marcus
Aurelius. It will be neither cheerful nor pleasant but will
contain numerous passages of striking humor. Since first-class
minds never believe anything very strongly until they've
experienced it, its value will be purely relative . . . all
people over thirty will refer to it as "depressing."

This prelude belongs to the story of a young man
who lived, as you and I do, before the book.

II

The generation which numbered Bryan Dalyrimple drifted out of
adolescence to a mighty fan-fare of trumpets. Bryan played the
star in an affair which included a Lewis gun and a nine-day romp
behind the retreating German lines, so luck triumphant or
sentiment rampant awarded him a row of medals and on his arrival
in the States he was told that he was second in importance only
to General Pershing and Sergeant York. This was a lot of fun.
The governor of his State, a stray congressman, and a citizens'
committee gave him enormous smiles and "By God, Sirs" on the
dock at Hoboken; there were newspaper reporters and
photographers who said "would you mind" and "if you could just";
and back in his home town there were old ladies, the rims of
whose eyes grew red as they talked to him, and girls who hadn't
remembered him so well since his father's business went blah! in
nineteen-twelve.

But when the shouting died he realized that for a month he had
been the house guest of the mayor, that he had only fourteen
dollars in the world and that "the name that will live forever
in the annals and legends of this State" was already living
there very quietly and obscurely.

One morning he lay late in bed and just outside his door he
heard the up-stairs maid talking to the cook. The up-stairs maid
said that Mrs. Hawkins, the mayor's wife, had been trying for a
week to hint Dalyrimple out of the house. He left at eleven
o'clock in intolerable confusion, asking that his trunk be sent
to Mrs. Beebe's boarding-house.

Dalyrimple was twenty-three and he had never worked. His father
had given him two years at the State University and passed away
about the time of his son's nine-day romp, leaving behind him
some mid-Victorian furniture and a thin packet of folded paper
that turned out to be grocery bills. Young Dalyrimple had very
keen gray eyes, a mind that delighted the army psychological
examiners, a trick of having read it--whatever it was--some time
before, and a cool hand in a hot situation. But these things