Mr. Sims is a bachelor.  Nor is he likely now to marry:  but this through no lack of veneration or respect for the sex.  It arises, apparently, from the fact that when Mr. Sims was young, during his college days, the beauty and charm of the girls who dwelt in his college town was such as to render all later women mere feeble suggestions of what might have been.  There was, as there always is, one girl in particular.  I have not heard my friend speak much of her.  But I gather that Kate Dashaway was the kind of girl who might have made a fit mate even for the sort of intellectual giant that flourished at Mr. Sims’s college.  She was not only beautiful.  All the girls remembered by Mr. Sims were that.  But she was in addition “a good head” and “a good sport,” two of the highest qualities that, in Mr. Sims’s view, can crown the female sex.  She had, he said, no “nonsense” about her, by which term Mr. Sims indicated religion.  She drank lager beer, played tennis as well as any man in the college, and smoked cigarettes a whole generation in advance of the age.

Mr. Sims, so I gather, never proposed to her, nor came within a measurable distance of doing so.  A man so prone, as is my friend, to spend his time in modest admiration of the prowess of others is apt to lag behind.  Miss Dashaway remains to Mr. Sims, as all else does, a retrospect and a regret.

But the chief peculiarities of the old gang—­as they exist in the mind of Mr. Sims—­is the awful fate that has overwhelmed them.  It is not merely that they are scattered to the four corners of the continent.  That might have been expected.  But, apparently, the most awful moral ruin has fallen upon them.  That, at least, is the abiding belief of Mr. Sims.

“Do you ever hear anything of McGregor now?” I ask him sometimes.

“No,” he says, shaking his head quietly.  “I understand he went all to the devil.”

“How was that?”

“Booze,” says Mr. Sims.  There is a quiet finality about the word that ends all discussion.

“Poor old Curly!” says Mr. Sims, in speaking of another of his classmates.  “I guess he’s pretty well down and out these days.”

“What’s the trouble?” I say.

Mr. Sims moves his eyes sideways as he sits.  It is easier than moving his head.

“Booze,” he says.

Even apparent success in life does not save Mr. Sims’s friends.

“I see,” I said one day, “that they have just made Arthur Stewart a Chief Justice out west.”

“Poor old Artie,” murmured Mr. Sims.  “He’ll have a hard time holding it down.  I imagine he’s pretty well tanked up all the time these days.”

When Mr. Sims has not heard of any of his associates for a certain lapse of years, he decides to himself that they are down and out.  It is a form of writing them off.  There is a melancholy satisfaction in it.  As the years go by Mr. Sims is coming to regard himself and a few others as the lonely survivors of a great flood.  All the rest, brilliant as they once were, are presumed to be “boozed,” “tanked,” “burnt out,” “bust-up,” and otherwise consumed.