The banker winced.

“We can make it all snug, right in the family,” insisted Harnden.  He jumped up, opened the door into the hallway, and called.  He kept calling, his tones growing more emphatic, till the girl replied from abovestairs.

“She’s coming down,” reported the general manager of the household, taking his stand in front of the fireplace.  He pulled on a chain and dragged out a bunch of keys and whirled them like a David taking aim with a sling.

Vona came no farther than the doorway, and stood framed there.

“What’s this last nonsense—­that you won’t go to your work in the morning?”

“Your pay is raised ten dollars a week, starting to-morrow,” supplemented Britt, appealingly.

But there was no compromise in the girl’s mien.  “Mr. Britt, I realize perfectly well that I ought to give you due notice—­the usual two weeks.  That would be the honorable business way.  But you have set the example of disregarding business methods, in your treatment of Mr. Vaniman.  You mustn’t blame others for doing as you’re doing.  Therefore I positively will not come into the bank, as conditions are.  As I feel to-night I shall feel to-morrow!  If you, or my father and mother, think you can change my mind on the matter, you’ll merely waste your arguments.”

That time she did not run away.  She surveyed them in turn, leisurely and perfectly self-possessed.  Even the optimist recognized inflexibility when he was bumped against it hard enough!  She stepped backward, challenging reply, but they were silent, and she went upstairs.

“Still, nobody knows what the morning may bring forth,” persisted Harnden, after waiting for somebody else to speak.  “As I have said, I have a knack—­”

“Of blowing up paper bags and listening to ’em bust!” snarled the banker, permitting himself, at least, to express his real opinion of a man whom he had always held to be an impractical nincompoop.  “If you count cash the way you count chickens before they’re hatched, you’d make a paper bag out of my bank.  I’ll bid you good night!”

He wrenched away from Harnden’s restraining hands and shook himself under the shower of the optimist’s pattering words, as a dog would shake off rain.  In the hall he pulled on his overcoat and turned up the collar, for the words still pattered.  He went out into the night and slammed the door.

Britt began his program of general anathema by shaking his fist at the Harnden house after he had reached the street.  He shook his fist at the other houses along the way as he went tramping in the middle of the road toward his home.  He even brandished his fist at his own statue in the facade of Britt Block.  The moonlight revealed the complacent features; the cocky pose of serene confidence presented by the effigy affected the disheartened original with as acute a sense of exasperation as he would have felt if the statue had set thumb to nose and had wriggled the stone fingers in impish derision.