it to be. Eleanor sees too
much of the black side, poverty, starvation, hard luck--all kinds of
deviltry, and it reacts on her. I look only on the cheerful side, and
that reacts on me. A good dinner, a glass of burgundy--there's an answer
to all that socialistic pessimism."

"Suppose one hasn't the answer at hand?" his daughter broke in.

"Keep smiling, my dear," retorted her father with Spartan grimness.
"Skipping a dinner or two can't overturn real philosophy. Down on the
Chesapeake last fall, duck shooting one day, we lost the luncheon hamper
overboard, and hadn't so much as a biscuit from four in the morning till
after nine at night, shooting from a chilly, wet blind all day. _There_
was a test! But I give you my word I never worried. I took it as so much
discipline. My dear, if I had fretted over tenement houses the way you
have, I should be a broken man. Thank the gods that be, I've had the wit
to let my agent do all that!"

His daughter received this with a shrug of despair. "But confess,
daddy--you _have_ a worry."

"'Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!'" quoted Piersoll,
divining her mark.

"I admit, my dear, that legitimate worry has its uses. I only warn
against the too common abuse of it. I maintain," he went on, turning to
Ewing, "that a man with the feelings of a boy should, if there's any
moral balance in the world, retain the waistline of a boy; yet I've not
done it. I go to doctors--they all talk the same ballyrot about exercise
or they harangue you about diet. Why, I've heard them gibber of things
one mustn't eat till I writhed in anguish. Some day I know I shall chuck
it all and let Nature take her course." He glared defiantly about the
table.

"She's not waiting for you to let her, dear," observed his daughter
maliciously.

"It's my temperament, I suppose"--he sighed ruefully into his plate of
sweet stuff--"just as it's Randy Teevan's temperament to keep slender,
though I suspect Randy of stays."

Mrs. Laithe had glanced swiftly toward Ewing at the mention of this
name. She again looked at him alertly a moment later when the man
announced "Mr. Teevan and Mr. Alden Teevan."

"Alden told me this afternoon at the club, my dear, that he and his
father might stop for a moment on their way up town, just to say
'How-de-do.' We can have coffee in the library."

His daughter received this with a meditative under lip. Then she
brightened.

"I'm sure you men would rather sit here and