y resolute to show that he was not incommoded by the
exchange of these civilities.

"Yes," said Bromfield Corey. "Tom has had the pleasure which I hope
for of seeing you all. I hope you're able to make him useful to you
here?" Corey looked round Lapham's room vaguely, and then out at the
clerks in their railed enclosure, where his eye finally rested on an
extremely pretty girl, who was operating a type-writer.

"Well, sir," replied Lapham, softening for the first time with this
approach to business, "I guess it will be our own fault if we don't. By
the way, Corey," he added, to the younger man, as he gathered up some
letters from his desk, "here's something in your line. Spanish or
French, I guess."

"I'll run them over," said Corey, taking them to his desk.

His father made an offer to rise.

"Don't go," said Lapham, gesturing him down again. "I just wanted to
get him away a minute. I don't care to say it to his face,--I don't
like the principle,--but since you ask me about it, I'd just as lief
say that I've never had any young man take hold here equal to your son.
I don't know as you care."

"You make me very happy," said Bromfield Corey. "Very happy indeed.
I've always had the idea that there was something in my son, if he
could only find the way to work it out. And he seems to have gone into
your business for the love of it."

"He went to work in the right way, sir! He told me about it. He looked
into it. And that paint is a thing that will bear looking into."

"Oh yes. You might think he had invented it, if you heard him
celebrating it."

"Is that so?" demanded Lapham, pleased through and through. "Well,
there ain't any other way. You've got to believe in a thing before you
can put any heart in it. Why, I had a partner in this thing once,
along back just after the war, and he used to be always wanting to
tinker with something else. 'Why,' says I, 'you've got the best thing
in God's universe now. Why ain't you satisfied?' I had to get rid of
him at last. I stuck to my paint, and that fellow's drifted round
pretty much all over the whole country, whittling his capital down all
the while, till here the other day I had to lend him some money to
start him new. No, sir, you've got to believe in a thing. And I
believe in your son. And I don't mind telling you that, so far as he's
gone, he's a success."

"That's very kind of you."

"No kindness about it. As I was saying the other day to a