The son suffered the father to reach his climax with smiling patience. When he asked finally, “What are the characteristics of Papa Lapham that place him beyond our jurisdiction?” the younger Corey crossed his long legs, and leaned forward to take one of his knees between his hands.
“Well, sir, he bragged, rather.”
“Oh, I don’t know that bragging should exempt him from the ordinary processes. I’ve heard other people brag in Boston.”
“Ah, not just in that personal way—not about money.”
“No, that was certainly different.”
“I don’t mean,” said the young fellow, with the scrupulosity which people could not help observing and liking in him, “that it was more than an indirect expression of satisfaction in the ability to spend.”
“No. I should be glad to express something of the kind myself, if the facts would justify me.”
The son smiled tolerantly again. “But if he was enjoying his money in that way, I didn’t see why he shouldn’t show his pleasure in it. It might have been vulgar, but it wasn’t sordid. And I don’t know that it was vulgar. Perhaps his successful strokes of business were the romance of his life—”
The father interrupted with a laugh. “The girl must be uncommonly pretty. What did she seem to think of her father’s brag?”
“There were two of them,” answered the son evasively.
“Oh, two! And is the sister pretty too?”
“Not pretty, but rather interesting. She is like her mother.”
“Then the pretty one isn’t the father’s pet?”
“I can’t say, sir. I don’t believe,” added the young fellow, “that I can make you see Colonel Lapham just as I did. He struck me as very simple-hearted and rather wholesome. Of course he could be tiresome; we all can; and I suppose his range of ideas is limited. But he is a force, and not a bad one. If he hasn’t got over being surprised at the effect of rubbing his lamp—”
“Oh, one could make out a case. I suppose you know what you are about, Tom. But remember that we are Essex County people, and that in savour we are just a little beyond the salt of the earth. I will tell you plainly that I don’t like the notion of a man who has rivalled the hues of nature in her wildest haunts with the tints of his mineral paint; but I don’t say there are not worse men. He isn’t to my taste, though he might be ever so much to my conscience.”
“I suppose,” said the son, “that there is nothing really to be ashamed of in mineral paint. People go into all sorts of things.”
His father took his cigarette from his mouth and once more looked his son full in the face. “Oh, is that it?”
“It has crossed my mind,” admitted the son. “I must do something. I’ve wasted time and money enough. I’ve seen much younger men all through the West and Southwest taking care of themselves. I don’t think I was particularly fit for anything out there, but I am ashamed to come back and live upon you, sir.”
His father shook his head with an ironical sigh. “Ah, we shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluctance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth. It strikes at the root of the whole feudal system. I really think you owe me an apology, Tom. I supposed you wished to marry the girl’s money, and here you are, basely seeking to go into business with her father.”
Young Corey laughed again like a son who perceives that his father is a little antiquated, but keeps a filial faith in his wit. “I don’t know that it’s quite so bad as that; but the thing had certainly crossed my mind. I don’t know how it’s to be approached, and I don’t know that it’s at all possible. But I confess that I ‘took to’ Colonel Lapham from the moment I saw him. He looked as if he ‘meant business,’ and I mean business too.”
The father smoked thoughtfully. “Of course people do go into all sorts of things, as you say, and I don’t know that one thing is more ignoble than another, if it’s decent and large enough. In my time you would have gone into the China trade or the India trade—though I didn’t; and a little later cotton would have been your manifest destiny—though it wasn’t mine; but now a man may do almost anything. The real-estate business is pretty full. Yes, if you have a deep inward vocation for it, I don’t see why mineral paint shouldn’t do. I fancy it’s easy enough approaching the matter. We will invite Papa Lapham to dinner, and talk it over with him.”
“Oh, I don’t think that would be exactly the way, sir,” said the son, smiling at his father’s patrician unworldliness.
“No? Why not?”
“I’m afraid it would be a bad start. I don’t think it would strike him as businesslike.”
“I don’t see why he should be punctilious, if we’re not.”
“Ah, we might say that if he were making the advances.”
“Well, perhaps you are right, Tom. What is your idea?”
“I haven’t a very clear one. It seems to me I ought to get some business friend of ours, whose judgment he would respect, to speak a
