However, I once got a neatly written acceptance to an ultra-formal and gorgeously phrased note bearing my name, which I didn’t write. I was a new boy in Seneca at the time. I met a lot of girls at the skating rink in the old Armory building on upper Main Street. Ena Burbery, pretty and agreeably alert, was good on roller skates. Ena and four other girls worked as trimmers in the millinery department of the Cohen store. Ena talked. And the girls, all but one, joined in mailing her a note bearing my forged signature requesting her company for a swank party three days hence. Ella Murphy, one of the five, boarded and roomed at the Theodore Wolfley home, same as I did while working on Wolfley’s newspaper, The Tribune. Ella said the note was formal and softly silly, and so did Ena say it was awful — but, she giggled, “I was not going to let that spoil a date, especially for a party like that.” Now, the ridiculous part of it all is, that it was an exclusive party to be given by Seneca’s upper crust, to which I had no invitation. But, even so, it gave me elevated status for a little while, in a limited way. We compromised on the rink. And the girls, whom I never did meet, sent me an apology, through Ella Murphy, for recklessly abusing my name—and getting the girl a date. Ena was the section foreman’s daughter, but that was no handicap. I myself married a section foreman’s daughter, picked her for a winner from a sizable field of promising prospects. Naturally, I wanted to know more about the status of the rich man’s son—and I got it too, back at the gospel tent the next night. The girl said nothing at all about my poker-playing proclivities. She was too sensible to try to reform a boy. Her idea was to pick ‘em as suited her fancy—and trust to luck. Indeed, she said in rebuttal of her father’s expressed opinion of me, that if her mamma only could have kept her mouth shut everything would have been all right, and that I would have never known. “And besides,” she said, “You don’t drink, and papa does—a little; and you don’t smoke, and papa does, though he does not smoke cigarettes.” A cigarette smoker in those days was considered cheap. How times have changed. The girl had overlooked one of “Papa’s” weaknesses, but for me to have mentioned it to her then would have got me nothing that I was not now likely to get anyway. This exchange of ideas took place in the reserved corner of the arena in advance of the regular session while other congregated young people were likely thinking of an afar off haven having streets paved with jasper and gold. Something about streets and jasper and gold ran in the lines of the old song books. Also, I dare say, some of the converts might have cringed a little at the thought of an everlasting fire of brimstone—this idea emanating from George, the Evangelist—which the wayward and lukewarm alike might, if they didn’t watch out, fall into in a last-minute rush for that afar off haven.