Head and Shoulders

In 1915 Horace Tarbox was thirteen years old. In that year he
took the examinations for entrance to Princeton University and
received the Grade A--excellent--in Caesar, Cicero, Vergil,
Xenophon, Homer, Algebra, Plane Geometry, Solid Geometry, and
Chemistry.

Two years later while George M. Cohan was composing "Over There,"
Horace was leading the sophomore class by several lengths and
digging out theses on "The Syllogism as an Obsolete Scholastic
Form," and during the battle of Chateau-Thierry he was sitting at
his desk deciding whether or not to wait until his seventeenth
birthday before beginning his series of essays on "The Pragmatic
Bias of the New Realists."

After a while some newsboy told him that the war was over, and he
was glad, because it meant that Peat Brothers, publishers, would
get out their new edition of "Spinoza's Improvement of the
Understanding." Wars were all very well in their way, made young
men self-reliant or something but Horace felt that he could never
forgive the President for allowing a brass band to play under
his window the night of the false armistice, causing him to leave
three important sentences out of his thesis on "German
Idealism."

The next year he went up to Yale to take his degree as Master of
Arts.

He was seventeen then, tall and slender, with near-sighted gray
eyes and an air of keeping himself utterly detached from the mere
words he let drop.

"I never feel as though I'm talking to him," expostulated
Professor Dillinger to a sympathetic colleague. "He makes me feel
as though I were talking to his representative. I always expect
him to say: 'Well, I'll ask myself and find out.'"

And then, just as nonchalantly as though Horace Tarbox had been
Mr. Beef the butcher or Mr. Hat the haberdasher, life reached in,
seized him, handled him, stretched him, and unrolled him like a
piece of Irish lace on a Saturday-afternoon bargain-counter.

To move in the literary fashion I should say that this was all
because when way back in colonial days the hardy pioneers had
come to a bald place in Connecticut and asked of each other,
"Now, what shall we build here?" the hardiest one among 'em had
answered: "Let's build a town where theatrical managers can try
out musical comedies!" How afterward they founded Yale College
there, to try the musical comedies on, is a story every one
knows. At any rate one December, "Home James" opened at the
Shubert, and all the students encored Marcia Meadow, who sang a
song about the Blundering Blimp in the first act and did a shaky,
shivery, celebrated dance in the last.

Marcia was nineteen. She