"Two weeks, I think."

"Oh, dear, then you can't."

"Holy smoke, do you know what a first-class passage costs?"

"I don't want to know. Then you couldn't go, anyway, could you?"

"Hardly."

"Shall you miss me?"

"Yes."

"That will be nice, and I shall send you a card every day."

"Good Heavens!" he exclaimed. "If your father would only go broke
before then. If only he would!"

Stuyvesant did not go broke, and Frances sailed on the first of
June. Don went to the boat to see her off, and the band on the deck
played tunes that brought lumps to his throat. Then the hoarse whistle
boomed huskily, and from the Hoboken sheds he watched her until she
faded into nothing but a speck of waving white handkerchief. In
twenty minutes he was back again in the office of Carter, Rand &
Seagraves--back again to sheets of little figures with dollar signs
before them. These he read off to Speyer, who in turn pressed the
proper keys on the adding-machine--an endless, tedious, irritating
task. The figures ran to hundreds, to thousands, to tens of
thousands.

Nothing could have been more uninteresting, nothing more meaningless.
He could not even visualize the sums as money. It was like adding so
many columns of the letter "s." And yet, it was the accident of an
unfair distribution of these same dollar signs that accounted for the
fact that Frances was now sailing out of New York harbor, while he
remained here before this desk.

They represented the week's purchase of bonds, and if the name
"Pendleton, Jr.," had appeared at the head of any of the accounts he
might have been by her side.

Something seemed wrong about that. Had she been a steam yacht he could
have understood it. Much as he might have desired a steam yacht, he
would have accepted cheerfully the fact that he did not have the
wherewithal to purchase it. He would have felt no sense of injustice.
But it scarcely seemed decent to consider Frances from this point of
view, though a certain parallel could be drawn: her clean-cut lines,
her nicety of finish, a certain air of silver and mahogany about her,
affording a basis of comparison; but this was from the purely artistic
side. One couldn't very well go further and estimate the relative
initial cost and amount for upkeep without doing the girl an
injustice. After all, there was a distinction between a gasolene
engine and a heart, no matter how close an analogy physicians might
draw.

And yet, the only reason he was