"He COULD do it--if he wanted to." Alice failed to
comprehend the desirability of a glue factory--to her mind a father
engaged in a glue factory lacked impressiveness; had no advantage over
a father employed by Lamb and Company; and she supposed that Adams knew
better than her mother whether such an enterprise would be profitable
or not. Emphatically, he thought it would not, for she had heard him
shouting at the end of one of these painful interviews, "You can keep up
your dang talk till YOU die and _I_ die, but I'll never make one God's
cent that way!"

There had been a culmination. Returning from church on the Sunday
preceding the collapse with which Adams's illness had begun, Alice
found her mother downstairs, weeping and intimidated, while her father's
stamping footsteps were loudly audible as he strode up and down his room
overhead. So were his endless repetitions of invective loudly audible:
"That woman! Oh, that woman; Oh, that danged woman!"

Mrs. Adams admitted to her daughter that it was "the old glue factory"
and that her husband's wildness had frightened her into a "solemn
promise" never to mention the subject again so long as she had breath.
Alice laughed. The "glue factory" idea was not only a bore, but
ridiculous, and her mother's evident seriousness about it one of those
inexplicable vagaries we sometimes discover in the people we know best.
But this Sunday rampage appeared to be the end of it, and when Adams
came down to dinner, an hour later, he was unusually cheerful. Alice
was glad he had gone wild enough to settle the glue factory once and for
all; and she had ceased to think of the episode long before Friday of
that week, when Adams was brought home in the middle of the afternoon by
his old employer, the "great J. A. Lamb," in the latter's car.

During the long illness the "glue factory" was completely forgotten, by
Alice at least; and her laugh was rueful as well as derisive now, in the
kitchen, when she realized that her mother's mind again dwelt upon this
abandoned nuisance. "I thought you'd got over all that nonsense, mama,"
she said.

Mrs. Adams smiled, pathetically. "Of course you think it's nonsense,
dearie. Young people think everything's nonsense that they don't know
anything about."

"Good gracious!" Alice cried. "I should think I used to hear enough
about that horrible old glue factory to know something about it!"

"No," her mother returned patiently. "You've never heard anything