“Oh, good Lord! I don't know. Forget it. You make a noise like a hearse, Loosh.”
“Of course you don't know. I don't know. I don't suppose anybody knows, exactly. But isn't it great fun to study 'em up, and see the different kinds, and think about the old chaps who carved 'em, and wonder about 'em and—”
“No, I'll be banged if it is! It's crazy nonsense. You've got pigeons in your loft, Loosh. Come on out and give the birds an airing.”
This was the general opinion of the class of 19—, that old “Loosh had pigeons in his loft.” However, it was agreed that they were harmless fowl and that Galusha himself was a good old scout, in spite of his aviary.
He graduated with high honors in the mathematical branches and in languages. Then the no less firm because feminine hand of Aunt Clarissa grasped him, so to speak, by the collar and guided him to the portals of the banking house of Cabot, Bancroft and Cabot, where “Cousin Gussie” took him in charge with the instructions to make a financier of him.
“Cousin Gussie,” junior member of the firm, then in his early thirties, thrust his hands into the pockets of his smart tweed trousers, tilted from heels to toes of his stylish and very shiny shoes and whistled beneath his trim mustache. He had met Galusha often before, but that fact did not make him more optimistic, rather the contrary.
“So you want to be a banker, do you, Loosh?” he asked.
Galusha regarded him sadly through the spectacles.
“Auntie wants me to be one,” he said.
The experiment lasted a trifle over six months. At the end of that time the junior partner of Cabot, Bancroft and Cabot had another interview with his firm's most recent addition to its list of employees.