Yes, Johnny was vociferous--so long as the singing went on. But he developed, besides an obstreperous voice, an obstreperous interest in one of our Adeles--a piercing soprano who was our mainstay; and he showed some tendency to defeat the occasion by segregating her in a bay window. Segregation was the last of our aims, and Johnny did not quite please. Furthermore, Johnny seemed to feel himself among a lot of boys who were yet to make their "start," overlooking the fact that Raymond was in the bank, and ignorant of the further fact that one of our fellows was just beginning to be a salesman in a bond house. Johnny became violently communicative about the attractions of Dellwood Park and seemed to want to figure demonstratively in the eyes of Gertrude and Adele as an up-and-coming paladin of the business world. To most of us he seemed too self-assertive, too self-assured. He knew too clearly what he wanted, and showed it too clearly. Indeed it became apparent to me that while a boy of twelve may be accepted easily (at least in an early, simple society), a youth of eighteen cannot altogether escape the issues of caste. It was borne in on me presently that Johnny might as well have remained away. In fact-- "We shan't need him again," said the brother of the soprano to me, as the evening broke up. And Raymond himself remarked to me a day later:-- "Don't push him; he'll get along without your help." IV While the rankness of new elements in a new era had not penetrated our homes, it had begun to make itself manifest in public places. The town, within sixty years, had risen from a population of nearly _nil_ to a population of some five or six hundred thousand; and it was only in due course, perhaps, that "vice" now raised its head and that a "criminal class" came into effective, unabashed functioning. It was to be many years before the better elements learned how to combine for an efficient opposition to impudent evils. A heterogeneous populace, newly arrived, was still willing to elect mayors of native blood; but one of these, elected and reelected to the town's lasting harm, might as well have been of the newer, and wholly exterior, tradition: a genial, loose-lipped demagogue who saw an opportunity to weld the miscellany of discrepant elements into a compact engine for the furtherance of his own coarse ambitions, and who allowed his supporters such a measure of license as was needed to make their support continuing. A shameless new quarter suddenly obtruded itself with an ugly emphasis; unclassifiables, male and female, began to assert and disport themselves more daringly than dreamt of heretofore; and many good citizens who would crowd the town forward to a population of a million and to a status undeniably metropolitan came to stroll these tawdry, noisy new streets with a curiosity of mind at once disturbed, titillated, and somehow gratified. Said some: "This is a new thing; do we quite like it?" Said others: "The