The why of this became a consuming thought. After all they had said, why did I seemingly obstinately continue to add those long strokes which did not belong there?, Although I was not very alert mentally, (my hand­writing  from  those  days  shows  that  I  was  mentally  about  as  nim-com-poopish as the average, maybe more so) I came up against the problem of finding why I put those pesky tag ends on there. Monkeys had long tails, but I studied myself in the mirror and did not find any more resemblance than there was between other people and the simian.

Was I putting those tag ends on there because there was something wrong with me mentally, or was it because I liked graphoanalysis instead of base­ball, and had a morbid fear of snakes? There was nothing else to do. The reason had to be found, and I set out to find it. No young fellow ever wrote more love letters and joined more correspondence clubs than I did in those days. Now and then I found a writer who put on long tails to the words, but their photographs all looked like nice girls, or fairly decent young fellows. When they did it, however, we certainly had one thing in common.  What was it?