THE DOING OF THE LAMBS
By Susan Sayre Titsworth
Well, so long, fellows,” said the Goat, and rose to go.
“Good-night, old man,” responded the cheerful chorus of his hosts. As the Goat went out into the hall there was silence in the room he had left, which lasted until after he had opened the hall door and had had time to close it. But instead of closing it, he merely bumped noisily against it, and rattled the knob, and stood listening. As if his departure were a signal, a roar of laughter from within followed his stratagem. One voice rose above the noise.
“By George!” it said. “Isn’t he the limit?”
The Goat closed the door silently and mounted the stairs to his own room in the apartment above. His suspicions were confirmed.
They had dragged him in with them as they all came over together from dinner at the Commons, to tell them some more of his wild Western tales. It was not the first time they had done it. They were a select little group of Eastern men, two or three years out of Harvard or Yale, in rather good repute with the faculty of the Law School for the quality of their work, and known among their fellow students as the Lambs, from their somewhat ostentatious habit of flocking together.
The Goat was from the West, a graduate of a prairie college of Moravian foundation, an athletic, good-looking young fellow in badly-fitting clothes, who appeared in no way ashamed to admit that he had never before been east of the Mississippi, and was frankly impressed by New York. His gaucherie was not ungraceful; there was an attractive impertinence in his cheerful assertions that his Moravian grandparents had desired him not to smoke or drink until he had completed his education and was earning his own living, and that, consequently, he knew tobacco only by sight and smell, and had contented himself with looking on the wine when it was red. There was one vacant seat at the table, which the Lambs occupied at the Commons; with an eye to future entertainment they had invited the Goat to join them, and in the two months since the term began, the arrangement had given general satisfaction.