“Oh, I’ve seen a heap of misery in New York due to just wanting to get ahead—­I don’t know where; fellows that are just crazy to make ’big money’ as you call it, in order to ride in motors and get into some sort of society.  All the clerks, office boys and stenographers seem to want to become stockbrokers.  Personally I don’t see what there is in it for them.  I don’t figure out that my boy would be any happier with two million dollars than without.  If he had it he would be worrying all the time for fear he wasn’t getting enough fun for his money.  And as for my girl I want her to learn to do something!  I want her to have the discipline that comes from knowing how to earn her own living.  Of course that’s one of the greatest satisfactions there is in life anyway—­doing some one thing as well as it can be done.”

“Wouldn’t you like your daughter to marry?” I demanded.

“Certainly—­if she can find a clean man who wants her.  Why, it goes without saying, that is life’s greatest happiness—­that and having children.”

“Certainly!” I echoed with an inward qualm.

“Suppose she doesn’t marry though?  That’s the point.  She doesn’t want to hang round a boarding house all her life when everybody is busy doing interesting things.  I’ve got a theory that the reason rich people—­especially rich women—­get bored is because they don’t know anything about real life.  Put one of ’em in a law office, hitting a typewriter at fifteen dollars a week, and in a month she’d wake up to what was really going on—­she’d be alive!”

   “’The world is so full of a number of things
   I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings!’”

said I.  “What’s Sylvia going to do?”

“Oh, she’s quite a clever little artist.”  He handed me some charming sketches in pencil that were lying on the table.  “I think she may make an illustrator.  Heaven knows we need ’em!  I’ll give her a course at Pratt Institute and then at the Academy of Design; and after that, if they think she is good enough, I’ll send her to Paris.”

“I wish I’d done the same thing with my girls!” I sighed.  “But the trouble is—­the trouble is—­You see, if I had they wouldn’t have been doing what their friends were doing.  They’d have been out of it.”

“No; they wouldn’t like that, of course,” agreed Hastings respectfully.  “They would want to be ‘in it’”

I looked at him quickly to see whether his remark had a double entendre.

“I don’t see very much of my daughters,” I continued.  “They’ve got away from me somehow.”

“That’s the tough part of it,” he said thoughtfully.  “I suppose rich people are so busy with all the things they have to do that they haven’t much time for fooling round with their children.  I have a good time with mine though.  They’re too young to get away anyhow.  We read French history aloud every evening after supper.  Sylvia is almost an expert on the Duke of Guise and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.”