When one of your youngest journalists from Franciscan House called upon me last night, I guessed at once that you were either away from home or that you had given the lad carte blanche to collect material for a "silly season" discussion, without adding an Olympian hint or two as to where he had best go hunting. As a matter of fact both surmises turned out to be correct; and I even seemed to detect in him a certain air of relief as he admitted the first, while he was still young enough to feel rather important with regard to the second. Unhappy youth—how should he know that he had run into the very jaws of your arch-enemy?
It was a college friendship with Horace, he informed me, that was his excuse for calling upon me, although of course he knew quite well that I was an eminent authority on the subject in hand. This was so obvious an afterthought that I couldn't help asking him what the subject might be. He told his lie so nicely, you see, and was so humbly aware of its small worth. He coloured a little.
"Are we nervous?" he said.
I pushed over the tobacco-jar, and asked him to fill his pipe.
"I hope not," I replied, and he coloured a little more.
"You don't understand," he explained. "That is to be the headline of the discussion. At least, that was what I'd thought myself. But some of the other fellows have suggested, 'Are we more nervous?' or 'Where are our National Nerves?' or 'National Neurosis; are we suffering from it?'"
I nodded.
"Yours is the shortest," I said.
"Just so," he replied, "and, I think, the most arresting."
"And who's going to write the first letter?" I asked.