nd losing ground, Kenny felt that he must needs dramatize his
parental right to authority for the benefit of Garry's ears and his own
pride.

"Silence!" he thundered, striding toward the door. He flung it back
with the air of a conqueror. His stage play fell rather flat. Garry
Rittenhouse, in bathrobe and slippers, confronted the pair with a look
of weary inquiry. He sometimes regretted that as a peacemaker he had
become an institution. Nobody said anything. Garry hunted cigarettes,
cleared a chair and sat down.

"It may or may not interest you two to know that I was in bed," he
began irritably. "I wish to Heaven you'd fight in union hours."

Brian was sorry and said so. Kenny, however, took immediate advantage
of Garry's attitude to sidetrack what he considered the preposterous
irrelevance of the shotgun, the one unessential thing in the studio,
and point with rising temper to the statuette. It had, alas! been a
birthday present from Ann Marvin, whose statuettes, fashionable and
satiric, were famous.

It was like Kenny to have a grievance. He was hardly ever without one.
But justification was rare indeed and he made the best of it. He said
all that was on his mind without restraint as to duration or intensity,
thunderstruck at Brian's white-hot response. For twenty minutes of
Irish fire and fury, Garry listened in amazement, sensing an
unaccustomed stubbornness in Brian's anger.

"Just a minute," said Garry, dazed. "Let's get down to brass tacks.
Who and what began it?"

They both told him.

"One at a time, please!" he begged. "I gather that you, Kenny, in need
of petty funds, went out to pawn Brian's shotgun. And you, Brian,
losing your temper, flung a brush across the studio and smashed a
valued statuette--"

Kenny chose indignantly to tell it all again and overshot the mark,
bringing Garry down upon him with a bark.

"Now, see here, Kenny," he interposed curtly, "that's enough. Brian's
usually sane and regular. It's by no means a criminal offense for him
to pick a row with you about his shotgun. And he didn't mean to smash
the statuette."

He waited for the voice of thunder in which Kenny, at a disadvantage,
would be sure to disinherit his son and, waiting, glanced a trifle
wryly at the littered studio. What Brian lost by chronic
disinheritance lay ever before the eye, particularly now when Kenny, in
one of his periods of insolvency, was posted downstairs for club debt
and Mrs. Hagge