at breakneck speed through Glendale to Flintridge, pursued by a demon thought. While he sat drinking with Buddy Nolan, the ugly idea had slowly filtered into his mind. As Buddy talked, it spread. He was seeing the faintly discerned outlines of reality for the first time.
In Selma, such things had been a joke, a nasty joke. To have believed in their actuality would have stamped one as a dope, a hop-head. The boys back home had been plenty lusty, plenty filthy, too—but in a noisy, reassuring way. They cursed, they were mean, cruel, even disgusting at times. But they were men.
Ken, who had read few novels, who had visited no big cities except for flying trips during training periods, had never conceived the possible existence of such coteries as he had seen grouped about the Rendezvous. While Buddy was talking, as he established with finality the reasons for these attachments of man to man, Ken had not been able to speak. The gin had slowly warmed him. He had viewed the Rendezvous with more acute eyes. As he drank, the certainty grew. These boys and men were … the conventional Selma word was "fairies." Buddy, too.
But why did Buddy admit Ken to his confidence? Why this talk of Mr. Lowell?
Not until the moist, foggy evening air struck Ken's cheeks and he had bidden Buddy a calm good-night at the entrance to the school, did Ken have the necessary time for quiet reasoning. He reviewed the events since he had left Selma. He tried to remember what had happened to him.
He had been mildly drunk all the time … sometimes with liquor, sometimes with Mr. Lowell's words, some-
