see my son trained to be something besides a looney inventor
like his grandfather before him."

"It's all I want in life, Harry, to see my two boys of you happy."

"It's your woman-ideas I got to blame for this. I want you to stop, Millie,
putting rich man's ideas in his head. You hear? I won't stand for it."

"Harry, if--if it's the money, maybe I could manage--"

"Yes--and scrimp and save and scrooge along without a laundress another
four years, and do his washing and--"

"I--could fix the money part, Harry--easy."

He regarded her with his jaw dropped in the act of chewing.

"By Gad! where do you plant it?"

"It--it's the way I scrimp, Harry. Another woman would spend it on clothes
or--a servant--or matinees. It ain't hard for a home body like me to save,
Harry."

He reached across the table for her wrist.

"Poor little soul," he said, "you don't see day-light."

"Let him go, Harry, if--if he wants it. I can manage the money."

His scowl returned, darkening him.

"No. A. E. Unger never seen the inside of a high school, much less a
college, and I guess he's made as good a pile as most. I've worked for the
butcher and the landlord all my life, and now I ain't going to begin being
a slave to my boy. There's been two or three times in my life where, for
want of a few dirty dollars to make a right start, I'd be, a rich man
to-day. My boy's going to get that right start."

"But, Harry, college will--"

"I seen money in 'Pan-America' long before Unger ever dreamed of producing
it. I sicked him onto 'The Official Chaperon' when every manager in town
had turned it down. I went down and seen 'em doing 'The White Elephant' in
a Yiddish theater and wired Unger out in Chicago to come back and grab it
for Broadway. Where's it got me? Nowhere. Because I whiled away the best
fifteen years of my life in an up-State burg, and then, when I came down
here too late in life, got in the rut of a salaried man. Well, where it
'ain't got me it's going to get my son. I'm missing a chance, to-day that,
mark my word, would make me a rich man but for want of a few--"

"Harry, you mean that?"

"My hunch never fails me."

She was leaning across the table, her hands clasping its edge, her small,
plump face even pinker.

He threw out his legs beneath the table and sat back, hands deep in
pockets, and a toothpick hanging limp from between lips that were sagging.

"Gad! if I had my life to live over again as a salaried man, I'd--