“Oh, good Lord!  I don’t know.  Forget it.  You make a noise like a hearse, Loosh.”

“Of course you don’t know. I don’t know.  I don’t suppose anybody knows, exactly.  But isn’t it great fun to study ’em up, and see the different kinds, and think about the old chaps who carved ’em, and wonder about ’em and—­”

“No, I’ll be banged if it is!  It’s crazy nonsense.  You’ve got pigeons in your loft, Loosh.  Come on out and give the birds an airing.”

This was the general opinion of the class of 19—­, that old “Loosh had pigeons in his loft.”  However, it was agreed that they were harmless fowl and that Galusha himself was a good old scout, in spite of his aviary.

He graduated with high honors in the mathematical branches and in languages.  Then the no less firm because feminine hand of Aunt Clarissa grasped him, so to speak, by the collar and guided him to the portals of the banking house of Cabot, Bancroft and Cabot, where “Cousin Gussie” took him in charge with the instructions to make a financier of him.

“Cousin Gussie,” junior member of the firm, then in his early thirties, thrust his hands into the pockets of his smart tweed trousers, tilted from heels to toes of his stylish and very shiny shoes and whistled beneath his trim mustache.  He had met Galusha often before, but that fact did not make him more optimistic, rather the contrary.

“So you want to be a banker, do you, Loosh?” he asked.

Galusha regarded him sadly through the spectacles.

“Auntie wants me to be one,” he said.

The experiment lasted a trifle over six months.  At the end of that time the junior partner of Cabot, Bancroft and Cabot had another interview with his firm’s most recent addition to its list of employees.

“You’re simply no good at the job, that’s the plain truth,” said the banker, with the candor of exasperation.  “You’ve cost us a thousand dollars more than your salary already by mistakes and forgetfulness and all the rest of it.  You’ll never make your salt at this game in a million years.  Don’t you know it, yourself?”

Galusha nodded.

“Yes,” he said, simply.

“Eh?  Oh, you do!  Well, that’s something.”

“I knew it when I came here.”

“Knew you would be no good at the job?”

“At this job, yes.”

“Then for heaven’s sake why did you take it?”

“I told you.  Aunt Clarissa wanted me to.”

“Well, you can’t stay here, that’s all.  I’m sorry.”

“So am I, for Auntie’s sake and yours.  I realize I have made you a lot of—­ah—­trouble.”

“Oh, that’s all right, that’s all right.  Hang it all, I feel like a beast to chuck you out this way, but I have partners, you know.  What will you do now?”

“I don’t know.”

Cousin Gussie reflected.  “I think perhaps you’d better go back to
Aunt Clarissa,” he said.  “Possibly she will tell you what to do. 
Don’t you think she will?”