best. No note accompanied it, but across the back Yvonne had written lines culled from one of the volumes of poetry Jock had given her:
I shall consume, remembering in what way
Your dark hair grows about your brow and cheek
And what divine absurdities you say . . ."
He purchased a costly frame and put the photograph in it. But after a day or two he discarded the frame, so that he could read the writing on the back again and again. That was Yvonne, telling hirn she would not forget him; that was solace. Whenever he stared into her pictured face, that other face from the newspaper clipping seemed to dance like a demon before him, and laugh at him through Yvonne's eyes. . . . He found himself looking more often at the quotation than at the photograph.
He sought companionship, especially in the evenings. He joined his fraternity brothers in long talkfests around the living-room fire, where they lounged with that indolent droop of the spinal column peculiar to youth, and smoked pipes, and conversed about women. Women were the perennial topic at the University. All other matters were discussed on schedule—football in the autumn, baseball in the spring—but women held sway at all seasons. . . . One night, after an exhaustive session, Jock sat up late compiling for his own edification a list of "Contents of an Average Undergraduate's Mind." It ran somewhat as follows: "Four brunettes. Nineteen blondes. Two hundred and twenty telephone numbers. Addresses of seven bootleggers. Probable outcome of Dempsey's next fight. Probable outcome of next world series. Innumerable stories about traveling salesmen, about Pat
