There's a train in fifteen minutes. It's the last. Quick, Monkey, the motor! Peter cried, Send my things to the Manhattan, as he jerked on his coat. He caught the train and some hours later he and Teddy Quartermouse might have been observed amusing themselves with highballs and a couple of girls at Rector's.
In time, college days passed. Peter confessed to me that the last two years were an awful strain but he stuck them out, chiefly because he could not think of anything else he wanted to do. His real mental agony began with his release. He dreaded life and most of all he dreaded work. His father, although well-to-do, had a sharply defined notion that a boy who would not work never amounted to anything. His peculiar nature sometimes asserted itself in ludicrous and fantastically exaggerated demonstrations of this theory. Once, for example, during a summer vacation spent in the country, he insisted that Peter skin a pig. You have an opportunity to learn now and you never can tell when you may have to skin another pig. When the time comes you will be prepared. His father, Peter returned from college discovered, was in no mood to tolerate vacillation or dawdling. But Peter seemed to feel no urge of any kind. I not only did not want to 'do anything, he explained, there was nothing that I wanted to do. Here his father, with whom the boy had never been particularly sympathetic (motive of the Œdipus complex by the flutes in
