“Marriage,” said the Major, “seems rather epidemic in these days.”

Randy rose restlessly and sat on the porch rail.  “Why in the world does John want to marry Daisy——­”

“Why not?” easily.  “There’s some style about Daisy——­”

“But there are lots of nice, comfortable, hard-working girls in this neighborhood.”

“Lead me to ’em,” Truxton mimicked young John, “lead me to ’em.  Mary says that Daisy is the best of the lot.  She has plenty of good sense back of her foolishness, and she is one of the best cooks in the county.  She and John are planning to go up to Washington and open an old-fashioned oyster house.  She says that people are complaining that they can’t get oysters as they did in the old days, and she is going to show them.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they made a success of it.  And I tell you this—­I envy John.  He will have a paying business, and here I am without a thing ahead of me, and I have married a wife and the ravens won’t feed us.”

Randy stuck his hands in his pockets with an air of sudden resolution.

“Look here,” he said, “why can’t we go halves in this car business?  It will pay our expenses, and we can finish our law course at the University.”

“Law?  Oh, look here, Randy, I thought you had given that up.”

“I haven’t, and why should you?  We will finish, and some day we will open an office together.”

The Major, whistling softly, listened and said nothing.

“I have been thinking a lot about it,” Randy went on, “and I can’t see much of a future ahead of me.  Not the kind of future that our families are expecting of us.  You and I have got to stand for something, Truxton, or some day the world will be saying that all the great men died with Thomas Jefferson.”

The Major went on with his lilting tune.  What a pair they were, these lads!  Randy, afire with his dreams, and rather tragic in his dreaming.  Truxton, light as a feather—­laughing.

“Why can’t we give to the world as much as the men who have gone before us?” Randy was demanding.  “Are we going to take everything from our ancestors, and give nothing to our descendants?”

Truxton chuckled.  “By Jove,” he said, “now that I come to think of it, I am the head of a family—­there’s Fiddle-dee-dee, and I shall have to reckon with Fiddle-dee-dee’s children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren—­who will expect that my portrait will hang on the wall at Huntersfield.”

“It is all very well to laugh,” said Randy hotly, “but that is the way it looks to me; that we have got to show to the world that our ambitions are—­big.  It is all very well to talk about the day’s work.  I am going to do it, and pay my way, but there’s got to be something beyond that to think about—­something bigger than I have ever known.”

He gained dignity through the sincerity of his purpose.  The Major, still whistling softly, wondered what had come over the boy.  He recognized a difference since he had last talked to him.  Randy was not only roused; he was ready to look life in the face, to wrest from it the best.  “If that is what love of the little girl is doing for him,” said the Major to himself, “then let him love her.”