“I need to work.  I’ve tried other things, but my thoughts always come back to the Hands.  I’m proud of your success you know.  I want to—­to batten on it.  And I want to carry it on.  I have ideas of my own.”

“I bet you have, and damned poor ideas, too,” snapped the old man.  “I’m not going to have them tried in my place while I’m alive.”

“Let me tell you what some of them are, won’t you, before you condemn them?” his son pleaded, refusing to be ruffled.

“No.  I won’t have my time wasted on any such childishness,” growled Peter senior.  “You ought to know better than to trouble me with every silly, trifling idea you get into your head.”

“To me this is not trifling,” Peter argued.  “It’s so serious that if you refuse to take me into your business—­I don’t care how humble a position you start me—­I shall begin to make my own way in the world.  I can’t go on as I am, living on you, with an allowance that comes out of the Hands, unless you give me some hope that I can soon work up to having a voice in the management.”

“I suppose what you are really hinting at is a bigger allowance under a different name,” sneered old Peter.  “Now you’re turning socialist—­oh, you don’t suppose I’m blind when I come to your name and your quixotic schemes in the newspapers!  You don’t like the red-hot chaps raving about ‘unearned increment,’ or whatever they call it.”

“No, it isn’t that,” Peter said simply.  “I don’t much care what people say, so long as I can help things along a bit; though, of course, I’d rather it would be with my money than yours, no matter how generous you are about giving and asking no questions.  I don’t ask for more, or want it.  But I do want to feel that—­forgive me, Father!—­I do want to feel that on the money I handle there’s no sweat wrung out of men’s bodies or tears from women’s eyes.”

Peter senior had sat only half turned from his desk, as if suggesting to Peter junior that the sooner he was allowed to get back to work, the better.  But at these last words, unexpected as a blow, he swung violently round in his revolving chair to glare at the young man.

“Well, I’m damned!” he ejaculated.

Peter sincerely hoped not, but felt that silence was safer than putting his hopes into words.

“This comes of turning socialist!  You insult your father who supports you in luxury—–­”

“I don’t mean to insult you, Father, and I don’t want to be supported in luxury.  I want to work for every cent I have.  I want to work hard.”

“I never thought,” Peter senior reflected aloud, abruptly changing his tone, “to hear a son of mine spout this sort of cheap folderol, and I never thought that any one of my blood would be weak enough to come crawling and begging to break a solemn promise.”

“It means strength, not weakness, to break some promises—­the kind that never ought to have been made,” Peter junior defended himself.  “I’d break it without crawling or begging if I thought you’d prefer, except that it would be no use.  Unless I had your permission, I couldn’t get taken into the Hands.”