The Vagabond sat apart balancing the thin glass on the palm of his hand watching the streamers of smoke weave their changing patterns about the heads of his friends. He had loosed his collar and the green striped tie was bound about his head giving him an air of Attic dignity enhanced by the sweet serenity of countenance that he so often achieved of an evening. He lifted his glass to his right eye and held it there as if it were a telescope, gazing through its opaque bottom with great earnestness, the slow smile of the contented seer disturbing the placid melancholy of his round face. With deliberation he closed his right eye although continuing to hold the telescope in front of him. The eye should be blind, he thought. Never mind. It's a good half-Nelson. "Gentlemen! A half-Nelson."

Nobody paid any attention to him although he had risen to his feet for the sake of effect and he sat down again with some abruptness unable to remember whether he had made his joke or not. "Good fellows, but a little slow." He sighed and started to light a cigarette but forgot to strike a match so that it never got him anywhere. "It's more fun to be fooled." He sighed again.

"That's the trouble with graduating, nobody cares." The Vagabond wept a hot tear that burned its way down his check and dropped quietly off the point of his chin. He was suddenly overwhelmed with an infinite loneliness, space rolled away from him in vast undulating planes of smoke and he seemed to be lifted in a cradle of other bearing him up and up until he thought he would burst. Far below him he saw his friends pouring Scotch into opaque glasses and sometimes just pouring Scotch. He saw himself standing alone on a great platform in a black gown and a mortar board. There was no one about. No crowds, no mothers, no girls, nothing.

The Vagabond rose, prophecy welling within him. "Gentlemen. Our Alma Mata doesn't care." He spoke with solemn dignity, stressing every word. No head stirred under its halo of smoke. No dull eye answered to his rhetoric.

The Vagabond sat down and cried himself to sleep.