And as it is with dress, so it is with other things. Jimmy Vance, although a doctor, never affected that dignity which has come to be my strongest personal characteristic. Jimmy never imitated anybody’s dignity. And as a consequence Jimmy is as free as the wind. If he wants to smoke, he does it. If he wants to drink, he takes a drink. If he wants to go roller-skating, he goes. And nobody ever thinks of objecting to anything he does. Jimmy has never led any one to expect any particular sort of conduct from him. He is full of surprises and nobody likes him the less for it. I can drink at my club—occasionally—or at a banquet, or at home; but I can not go into a bar like Jimmy and shake dice with a traveling man. I can smoke, but I could not chew tobacco. I can read, but I can not read light novels—that is, not unless I hide away to do it. If I were to go into our public library and ask for The Siege of the Seven Suitors I honestly think that old Miss Peters, our librarian, would faint dead away. Now it isn’t that I want to do these things which irks me, so much as the fact that I want to be able to do them if I feel like it. I thank God I have escaped the gravest danger which lies in the acquisition of too good habits—I have never become what so many men of super-excellent reputations do become—a hypocrite. I have been a poser, a pretender, a rebel—ah, I have fairly seethed with rebellion against the tyranny of this fictitious self at times!—but I have never broken my habits on the sly. I have lived up to the straw man I so foolishly put in my place; I have gone around and around in my lock-step of respectability when I felt that I might gladly have died for a single year of absolute personal freedom; I have made my bed and like Damiens I have lain chained to it with iron chains for years; and never before now have I cried aloud!
And Jimmy! What a life is Jimmy’s! Jimmy is as prosperous as I; as respected as I; far happier than I; and ah, how much more is Jimmy loved than I!
When the girls go away to boarding-school, Jimmy kisses them good-by; when they come home again, Jimmy kisses them hello. Jimmy never misses an opportunity to kiss them, coming or going. But who cares? Nobody. “It’s only old Jimmy,” the girls say. “It’s only old Jimmy,” echo their sweethearts. “It’s only Jimmy’s way!” giggle their mothers—for Jimmy kisses them, too; Jimmy is no fool. But suppose I should try it? Who would say, “It’s only old Jeremiah?”
Since there is small danger that your magazine will ever be read by any one who will recognize me in this letter, I don’t mind confessing that I did try it once; it is the only sin of the sort that I have on my conscience after twenty-five years of dignity, domestic and foreign. It was last year that it happened. The girl had been visiting one of my daughter’s chums for the Christmas vacation and she was one of the guests at the Christmas party we had at our house. I came into the front hall and found her standing all alone, directly under the mistletoe. I looked at her standing there so sweet and pretty and so unconscious of the mistletoe, and I wondered how it would feel to kiss some one on the lips. I have been kissed on the forehead for years. Even my children kiss me on the forehead. They learned to do that early, when they explained that my beard was “cratchy”. I looked at the girl again. I was tempted and I fell. That is, I tried to fall, but she wouldn’t let me.
“Why not?” I asked her. “You let my boy Tom do it.”
“Oh, but he’s only a boy!” she said.
“Well,” I insisted, “you let Jimmy do it!”
“Oh, but he’s an old man!” she exclaimed.
“Yes!” said I, “and so am I an old man!”
“Oh, but,” she protested, “you’re not that kind of an old man!”