all the other boys as secretary of the Y.M.C.A. He was tubercular; but the boys admired him because of his former skill as a baseball and basketball player. He spoke in a sad, sugary, whining voice; he was oppressively Christ-like; he spoke to them intimately about the lesson of the day, asking them what it might teach them in their daily lives, in acts of obedience and love to their parents and friends, in duty, courtesy, and Christian charity. And he told them that when they were in doubt about their conduct they should ask themselves what Jesus would say: he spoke of Jesus often in his melancholy, somewhat discontented voice—Eugene became vaguely miserable as he talked, thinking of something soft, furry, with a wet tongue.
He was nervous and constrained: the other boys knew one another intimately—they lived on, or in the neighborhood of, Montgomery Avenue, which was the most fashionable street in town. Sometimes, one of them said to him, grinning: “Do you want to buy The Saturday Evening Post, Mister?”
Eugene, during the week, never touched the lives of any of them, even in a remote way. His idea of their eminence was grossly exaggerated; the town had grown rapidly from a straggling village— it had few families as old as the Pentlands, and, like all resort towns, its caste system was liquidly variable, depending chiefly upon wealth, ambition, and boldness.
Harry Tarkinton and Max Isaacs were Baptists, as were most of the people, the Scotch excepted, in Gant’s neighborhood. In the social scale the Baptists were the most populous and were considered the most common: their minister was a large plump man with a red face and a white vest, who reached great oratorical effects, roaring at them like a lion, cooing at them like a dove, introducing his wife into the sermon frequently for purposes of intimacy and laughing, in a programme which the Episcopalians, who held the highest social eminence, and the Presbyterians, less fashionable, but solidly decent, felt was hardly chaste. The Methodists occupied the middle ground between vulgarity and decorum.
This starched and well brushed world of Sunday morning Presbyterianism, with its sober decency, its sense of restraint,
