Nineteen years ago I was graduated from Harvard.  My classmate and chum, Bob Brownley, of Richmond, Va., was graduated with me.  He was class poet, I, yard marshal.  We had been four years together at St. Paul’s previous to entering Harvard.  No girl and lover were fonder than we of each other.

My people had money, and to spare, and with it a hard-headed, Northern horse-sense.  The Brownleys were poor as church mice, but they had the brilliant, virile blood of the old Southern oligarchy and the romantic, “salaam-to-no-one” Dixie-land pride of before-the-war days, when Southern prodigality and hospitality were found wherever women were fair and men’s mirrors in the bottom of their julep-glasses.

Bob’s father, one of the big, white pillars of Southern aristocracy, had gone through Congress and the Senate of his country to the tune of “Spend and not spare,” which left his widow and three younger daughters and a small son dependent upon Bob, his eldest.

Many a warm summer’s afternoon, as Bob and I paddled down the Charles, and often on a cold, crispy night as we sat in my shooting-box on the Cape Cod shore, had we matched up for our future.  I was to have the inside run of the great banking business of Randolph & Randolph, and Bob was eventually to represent my father’s firm on the floor of the Stock Exchange.  “I’d die in an office,” Bob used to say, “and the floor of the Stock Exchange is just the chimney-place to roast my hoe-cake in.”  So when our college days were over my able had saddled Bob’s youth with the heavy responsibilities of husbanding and directing his family’s slim finances that he took to business as a swallow to the air.  We entered the office of Randolph & Randolph on the same day, and on its anniversary, a year later, my father summoned us into his office for a sort of tally-up talk.  Neither of us quite knew what was coming, and we thrilled with pleasure when he said: 

“Jim, you and Bob have fairly outdone my expectations.  I have had my eye on both of you and I want you to know that the kind of industry and business intelligence you have shown here would have won you recognition in any banking-house on ‘the Street.’  I want you both in the firm—­Jim to learn his way round so he can step into my shoes; you, Bob, to take one of the firm’s seats on the Stock Exchange.”

Bob’s face went red and then pale with happiness as he reached for my father’s hand.

“I’m very grateful to you sir, far more so than any words can say, but I want to talk this proposition of yours over with Jim here first.  He knows me better than any one else in the world and I’ve some ideas I’d like to thrash out with him.”

“Speak up here, Bob,” said my father.