climax by refusing my lobster a la Newburg and Harry’s oysters poulet, to have a second helping to the sole-leather welsh rarebit which Wilkins had constructed; Wilkins, a rank outsider, who had been asked to come to the meeting by every blessed girl in the club, although heretofore he had not been considered as a possible member, and in fact had been black-balled by the girls themselves!  And when it came time for the girls to go home, instead of each one being escorted by a single male member, Wilkins corralled the whole lot of them in a huge omnibus which he had hired, and drove off with them, leaving us disconsolate.  He smiled so broadly you could see his teeth in the dark.

This, as I have said, capped the climax.

“That settles it,” said Burnham.  “I’m going to New York for a rest.  These Dumfries Corners girls needn’t think they’re the only women in the world.  There are others.”

“I’m going to stay and stick it out,” said I.  “I’ve got my sister left.  She’ll never succumb to the Wilkins influence.”  But alas!  I leaned upon a broken reed.  My sister is a sensible girl, but she is “literary.”  She had a joke in Life once, and since that time she has neglected almost everything but writing and her brother.  She doesn’t neglect me, and altogether I’m glad she writes, since it fills her with enthusiasm until the articles come back, and up to now she had not written poetry.  But, as I say, I leaned upon a broken reed, for when, the next day, I asked her what she was writing, she laughed and showed me a sonnet.

“Poetry, eh?” I said, disapprovingly, as I looked over her manuscript.

“Yes,” she answered, modestly.  “A sonnet.”

And I read, “To S.W.”

“Who’s ‘S.W.?’” I asked, with a frown, although I little suspected what her answer would be.

“Sam Wilkins,” she replied.

I then realized the full force of Caesar’s “Et tu, Brute?” and fled.

Meanwhile Wilkins was becoming insufferable.  If Bunthorne was an ass, he was at least clever, but this Wilkins—­he was a whole drove of asses, and not a redeeming feature to the lot.  He could no more account for his sudden popularity than we could, but he could not help realizing it after a week or two, and then, for the first time in his life, he began to take notice.  We men all wanted to thrash him, and I think Burnham would have done it if the rest of us hadn’t prevented him.

“He needed a licking before this,” said Harry, “but now he’s worse than ever.  It isn’t conscious rectitude now, it’s triumphant virtue.  He makes me tired.  He was telling me the other day that while girls might be captivated by flippant, superficial, prancing dudes for a while, in the end solid worth would win, and then he went on to say that the youth of modern times cultivated his feet to the exclusion of his head, and that while he had, of course, learned to dance, he had not devoted all his time to it, and regarded it, after all, as a very minor sort of an attraction as far as women are concerned.  ’I don’t rely on my dancing, Burnham,’ he said.  ’It’s the head, and the heart, my boy, that triumphs.’  And when I asked him where he learned all this he answered, ‘from personal experience.’”