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the family could sit in the kitchen!”
    This was skimming over surfaces, and they contemplated each other briefly, confronted so soon by the changing standards and living conditions for young people, who at twenty-two and twenty-three like each other very much and do not possess back parlors and complaisant parents.
    â€œYour turn,” Lynn reminded him.
    â€œNo, not yet. What about this bank business? You don’t really like it, do you?” he asked her.
    â€œI’m crazy about it!”
    He said, a little self-consciously, “I didn’t listen, I’m afraid, when your department was first explained to me so I asked old Gunboat about it—”
    â€œGunboat?”
    â€œNorton. Did you ever look at his shoes?—I asked him today. He was tickled silly. He thought I was beginning to take an interest in the organization. In a way he was right. Do you mean to tell me that you expect to sit at a desk for the next forty years, looking up annual dues of clubs and things and trying to remember that the Racquet Club is not in Chicago nor yet in Red Hook and that the Junior League isn’t a church society?” he demanded.
    â€œOf course, I don’t expect to,” she told him. “There are other jobs. Better ones. I’m mad about the work. I’m going to start courses at Columbia, nights, in February; going to learn all I can. I like the whole atmosphere of the place.”
    â€œThat’s more than I do. Oh, well,” he shrugged, “what’s the use of bleating? I couldn’t go on with what I wanted to do, and that’s that. Only”—he grinned—“I’ve been taking nightcourses too.”
    â€œOh, Tom!” she regarded him, delighted. “Banking?”
    â€œNo, radio, at the Y. M. C. A.”
    â€œRadio!”
    â€œIt all comes natural to me,” he confessed, “Gee, I’m nuts about it. I could eat it up! I started to get my M. E. degree at Sheff, you know. Radio! Girl, I’ve a set I built myself in my rooms that will get anything from here to heaven, and sometimes when the static is bad, a bit of the other place, too. You’ll have to come and listen to it,” he told her.
    She said instantly, “I’d love to.” She asked, “I suppose you’re always tearing it to pieces? Father has one. It’s his only hobby. It never works because he is always doing something to it.”
    â€œI know a guy up in the UBC control room,” Tom told her. “I sneak up there a lot, and, gosh, it’s great stuff.” His eyes were suddenly no longer gay; they were wistful. He said, “Well, such is life. It’s always the way. Rising young banker longs to be a radio-service man.”
    She argued with animation, “But—banking? That’s constructive, marvelous—necessary. A grand job, I think. Your finger on the very pulse of the world.”
    â€œLike a ticker tape?” he demanded. “Not for me! Radio, isn’t that constructive too?”
    His eyes were blazing with enthusiasm. He ruffled his hair so that, more unruly than ever, it stood up in crests and waves, untidy, attractive. He looked, she thought, about ten years old. She said, dissatisfied, “Somehow I don’t see you as an announcer.”
    â€œOh—announcing—” He dismissed it with a wave of his big hand. “I don’t want to do that.” He grinned. “Me! Imagine trying to pronounce jawbreakers and getting dirty letters: ‘Dear sir, last night you said bin instead of bean!’ Hell’s bells, that’s the bunk, not but what some of ‘em aren’t swell guys at that. No, but the control room—the lab—that’s where I’d like to be, digging out new ways, short cuts, learning, discovering.”
    He was off. By the time they had reached the fluffy stuff in a glass she knew more—and less—about radio than she had everknown. Her