David Vallory’s smile broadened into a laugh.
“Thanks,” he said. “But what do you mean by ‘too good’?”
“Precisely what I say; no more and no less. You can take it from a total stranger, can’t you? You have a good jaw, and I shouldn’t care to get in your way if you had any reason to wish to beat me up. But your eyes tell another story.”
Vallory had a telegram in his pocket, the brief summons which, two days earlier, had caused him to drop pen and pencil in the Florida office and hasten to catch the first northbound train. There was nothing in the wording of the message to breed alarm; but the mere fact that his father had telegraphed him to come home had awakened disturbing qualms of anxiety. Wondering if he were still youthful enough to advertise the disquietude so plainly that a stranger might read the signs of it, he said:
“Well, go on; what do my eyes tell you?”
“This: that in spite of your twenty-five, six, or seven years, whatever they may be, you are still sufficiently youthful and unspoiled to take things at their face value. You believe good of a man or a woman until the evil is proved, and even then you change reluctantly. You hold your word as binding as your oath. In short, you are still generous enough to believe that the world is much better than the muckrakers would make it out to be. Isn’t this all true?”
“I should be sorry if I had to contradict you,” said Vallory soberly. “At that, you are only accusing me of the common civilized humanities. The world has been very decent to me, thus far. Doesn’t it occur to you that a man usually finds what he looks for in life?—that, as a general proposition, he gets just about what he is willing to give?”
The bearded man shook his head, as one too well seasoned to argue with unvictimized youth.
“Four years in college, and two in a Government service which taught you absolutely nothing about life as it is lived in a world of men and women and sharply competitive business,” he scoffed gently. “Ah, well; we’ll let it go with a word of advice—advice from a man whose name you don’t know, and whom you will most likely never meet again. When you come to take the plunge; the real plunge into the sure-enough puddle of life as it is lived by most men and not a few women; don’t tie up too hard with any man or set of men, or yet to those old-fashioned principles which you have been taught to regard as law and Gospel. If you do, you won’t succeed—in the only sense in which the world measures success.”
The train was moving on again, and Vallory was not sorry. Being healthily suspicious of cynicism in any of its forms, he was glad that his critical section mate had not chosen to begin on him at the dining-car breakfast, where they had first met. None the less, at the station stop he shook hands with the volunteer prophet of evil.