Here sits
Mr. Sims till the shadows fall in the street outside,
when a limousine motor trundles up to the club and rolls
him home.
And here of an afternoon Mr. Sims talks to me of his
college days when he was young. The last thirty years of
his life have moved in so gentle a current upon so smooth
a surface that they have been without adventure. It is
the stormy period of his youth that preoccupies my friend
as he sits looking from the window of the club at the
waving leaves in the summer time and the driving snow in
the winter.
I am of that habit of mind that makes me prone to listen.
And for this, perhaps, Mr. Sims selects me as the recipient
of the stories of his college days. It is, it seems, the
fixed belief of my good friend that when he was young he
belonged at college to a particularly nefarious crowd or
group that exists in his mind under the name of the "old
gang." The same association, or corporate body or whatever
it should be called, is also designated by Mr. Sims, the
"old crowd," or more simply and affectionately "the boys."
In the recollection of my good friend this "old gang"
were of a devilishness since lost off the earth. Work
they wouldn't.
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