SCARED TO LIFE 



in a cab. I arrived at a shabby genteel home un 

 expectedly. The woman who let me in intimated 

 very plainly by her manner that it was irregular 

 to come at that hour. She ought to have been 

 forewarned. I brushed her away with my sudden 

 fatherhood. &quot; He was in the class room,&quot; she said, 

 with an air of finality, as if the class room were a 

 bar to fathers. But she must have seen in my 

 face some gleams of a sudden and irresistible 

 voracity that would be dangerous to tamper with, 

 for she led the way with a grim and silent protest, 

 and I suddenly saw eight or ten little fellows in a 

 row on a bench. It seemed to me then that I 

 had never before encountered such a petrifaction 

 of all the natural functions of childhood. The 

 children appeared to be in some kind of a vise, 

 meant to squeeze them into indistinguishable uni 

 formity. But, as my eye ran along that human 

 gamut, it met one inscrutable note that made every 

 string in me vibrate. One of the faces was mine. 

 The moment it saw me, the big, blue eyes opened 

 wide, a pair of lips involuntarily cried, &quot; Papa,&quot; 

 and a pair of little arms seemed to stretch across 

 the space and clutch at me all over. 



I took him away in spite of protests, and when 

 the matron asked me with an utterly unanswera 

 ble superiority what I was going to do with him, 

 I crushed her with a bravado that could only 

 come out of Wall Street. &quot; We are going to 

 play pinochle,&quot; I said. 



He and I had the flat to ourselves that night. 

 I never had so much fun in my life. They must 



