“It might be strong enough to move me to a sacrifice of myself, and still fail to draw me into a willingness to risk the opinion you have expressed of what you term my manliness.  As a business man I know that I should be a failure, and then I’d have your pity instead of your good opinion.  Let me tell you that I am a very ordinary man.  I haven’t the quickness which is a business man’s enterprise, nor that judgment which is his safeguard.  My newspaper is a success, but it is mainly because I have a capable man in the business office.  It grieves me to disappoint you, and I will take an oath that if I felt myself capable I’d cheerfully give up journalism and place myself at your service.”

“Father,” said Mrs. Witherspoon—­and anxiously she had been watching her husband—­“I don’t see what more he could say.”

“He has said quite enough,” Witherspoon replied.

“But you are not angry, are you, papa?” Ellen asked.

“No, I’m hurt.”

“I’m very sorry,” said Henry, “but permit me to say that a man of your strength of mind shouldn’t be hurt by a present disappointment that may serve to prevent a possible calamity in the future.”

“High-sounding nonsense.  I could pick up almost any bootblack and make a good business man of him.”

“But you can’t pick up almost any boy and make a good bootblack of him.  The bootblack is already a business man in embryo.”

Witherspoon did not reply to this statement.  He mused for a few moments and then remarked:  “If it weren’t too late we might make a preacher of you.”

Mrs. Witherspoon’s countenance brightened.  “I am sure he would make a good one,” she said.  “My grandfather was a minister, and we have a book of his sermons now, somewhere.  If you want it, my son, I will get it for you.”

“Not to-night, mother.”

“I didn’t mean to-night.  Ellen, what are you giggling at?”

“Why, mother, he would rather smoke that old black pipe than to read any book that was ever printed.”

“When I saw the pipe that had robbed Kittymunks of his coat,” said Henry, “I thought of my pipe tied with a ribbon.”

During the remainder of the evening Witherspoon joined not in the conversation, he sat brooding, and when bed-time came, he stood in his accustomed place on the hearth-rug and wound his watch, still appearing to gaze at something far away.

CHAPTER XXIII.

HENRY’S INCONSISTENCY.

Snorting March came as if blown in off the icy lake, and oozy April fell from the clouds.  How weary we grow of winter in a cold land, and how loath is winter to permit the coming of spring!  May stole in from the south.  There came a warm rain, and the next morning strips of green were stretched along the boulevards.

Nature had unrolled double widths of carpet during the night, and at sunset a yellow button lay where the ground had been harsh so long—­a dandelion.  An old man, in whom this blithe air stirred a recollection of an amative past, sat on a bench in the park, watching the flirtations of thrill-blooded youth, and pale mothers, housed so long with fretful children, turned loose their cares upon the grass.  It was a lolling-time, a time to lose one’s self in the blue above, or sweetly muse over the green below.