pointing out that she had already said a good deal. "You must do something."

Ann entered the conversation for the first time. She was not very fond of her aunt, and liked her least when she was bullying Mr. Pett. There was something in Mrs. Pett's character with which the imperiousness which lay beneath Ann's cheerful attitude towards the world was ever at war. "What can uncle Peter possibly do?" she inquired.

"Why, get the boy back to America and make him work. It's the only possible thing."

"But is it possible?"

"Of course it is."

"Assuming that Jimmy Crocker would accept an invitation to come over to America, what sort of work could he do here? He couldn't get his place on the Chronicle back again after dropping out for all these years and making a public pest of himself all that while. And outside of newspaper work what is he fit for?"

"My dear child, don't make difficulties."

"I'm not. These are ready-made."

Mr. Pett interposed. He was always nervously apprehensive of a clash between these two. Ann had red hair and the nature which generally goes with red hair. She was impulsive and quick of tongue, and--as he remembered her father had always been--a little too ready for combat. She was usually as quickly remorseful as she was quickly pugnacious, like most persons of her colour. Her offer to type the story which now lay on her desk had been the amende honorable following on just such a scene with her aunt as this promised to be. Mr. Pett had no wish to see the truce thus consummated broken almost before it had had time to operate. "I could give the boy a job in my office," he suggested.

Giving young men jobs in his office was what Mr. Pett liked doing best. There were six brilliant youths living in his house and bursting with his food at that very moment whom he would have been delighted to start addressing envelopes downtown. Notably his wife's nephew, Willie Partridge, whom he looked on as a specious loafer. He had a stubborn disbelief in the explosive that was to revolutionize war. He knew, as all the world did, that Willie's late father had been a great inventor, but he did not accept the fact that Willie had inherited the dead man's genius. He regarded the experiments on Partridgite, as it was to be called, with the profoundest skepticism, and considered that the only thing Willie had ever invented or was likely to invent was a 

 Prev. P 13/237 next