Word: vagabonde
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...Vagabond and his confreres have just learned. The Vagabond's old admirer, the Radcliffe Daily, is no more. She exists still in spirit, as the Radcliffe News-Daily, but the spark which made her is gone, for she appears only thrice a week, and has lost her trim slimness. She has time before each issue to wipe her spectacles, arrange the knot on the back of her head a bit more neatly, and write a reflective editorial full of concise, trenchant phrases about poetry and politics, or war debts. It is thus that she has lost caste. There...
Perhaps it is only that Radcliffe has changed, though there are doubts on that score. Of course, the Vagabond wandered a bit confusedly through Gothic Yale Saturday, of course he drank cocktails with very smooth Elis, but, unexpectedly, he met Radcliffe after the game in a Harkness study. She was drying her shoes before the fire, and as she wriggled silken toes all was confessed. Not ships and sealing-wax were the topics of conversation, not the game, for Radcliffe felt very bad on that point (she had been there with a Yale man) but Harvard men themselves were dissected...
...Vagabond was, they said, cynical, but they were wrong. There are excuses in this mortal life for anything, if they must be given, and while it is better to let the scoffing charge pass unnoticed, cynical is a hard word. Everyone may go by a softer name but the cynic. The sinister, cheerful lawbreaker who warms your entrails is an "importer." He who steals your trashy purse because you pay safely by check, is no usurer, but a respectable banker. So along the line, gentlemen all, does the world avoid rasping unpleasantness, except the cynic, whose avocation of cavity...
...Vagabond loves not a cold ride through tortuous traffic, even though he may find a goal in a new haven. No more is he thrilled by the prospect of a makeshift bed in the room of one to him had stranger. Even more reluctantly does he embrace the task of wresting precious tickets from the hands of those whose God-given work it would seem to be to keep them hidden in the filling cases on Harvard Street. Then there is the bitter disappointment when he reaches for the flagon, and finds only the flask...
...there are reasons, next let there be facts. The change from the bullfinch and wren to the gargoyle is good, as is, in the light of evolutionary abstraction, any change. More than this the Vagabond is an incorrigible romanticist to whose lights the very juices of a glamorous spectacle are good. He is bewitched by the surging crowds, maddened by a foolish, over-emphasized sport. He falls under the enchantment of fair ladyes, breathing an exotic Parisian perfume (twenty-five dollars an ounce in the year of our Lord nineteen-hundred and twenty-nine)and he remembers one, perhaps...