“She didn’t have to work so hard either.  Angus begun to get a broader horizon in just a few days, corrupting every waiter he came in contact with, and there was a report round the hotel the summer I was there that a hat-boy had actually tried to reason with him, thinking he was a foreigner making mistakes with his money by giving up a dollar bill every time for having his hat snatched from him.  As a matter of fact, Angus can’t believe to this day that dollar bills are money.  He feels apologetic when he gives ’em away.  All the same I never believed that report about the hat-boy till someone explained to me that he wasn’t allowed to keep his loot, not only having clothes made special without pockets but being searched to the hide every night like them poor unfortunate Zulus that toil in the diamond mines of Africa.  Of course I could see then that this boy had become merely enraged like a wild-cat at having a dollar crowded onto him for some one else every time a head waiter grovelled Angus out of the restaurant.

“The novelty of that life wore off after about a year, even with side trips to resorts where the prices were sufficiently outrageous to charm Ellabelle.  She’d begun right off to broaden her own horizon.  After only one week in New York she put her diamond napkin pincher to doing other work, and after six months she dressed about as well as them prominent society ladies that drift round the corridors of this hotel waiting for parties that never seem on time, and looking none too austere while they wait.

“So Ellabelle, having in the meantime taken up art and literature and gone to lectures where the professor would show sights and scenes in foreign lands with his magic lantern, begun to feel the call of the Old World.  She’d got far beyond ’Lucile’—­though ‘Peck’s Bad Boy’ was still the favourite of Angus when he got time for any serious reading—–­ and was coming to loathe the crudities of our so-called American civilization.  So she said.  She begun to let out to Angus that they wasn’t doing right by the little one, bringing him up in a hole like New York City where he’d catch the American accent—­though God knows where she ever noticed that danger there!—­and it was only fair to the child to get him to England or Paris or some such place where he could have decent advantages.  I gather that Angus let out a holler at first so that Ellabelle had to consult another specialist and have little Angus consult one, too.  They both said:  ’Certainly, don’t delay another day if you value the child’s life or your own,’ and of course Angus had to give in.  I reckon that was the last real fight he ever put up till the time I’m going to tell you about.