Paradise Garden | Page 3

it over?" I laughed. "A growing youth isn't a fifteen-pound shot or a football, Ballard."
"You could if you wanted to. Five thousand a year isn't to be sneezed at."
"I assure you that I've never felt less like sneezing in my life, but--"
"Think, man," he urged, "all expenses paid, a fine house, horses, motors, the life of a country gentleman. In short, your own rooms, time to read yourself stodgy if you like, and a fine young cub to build in your own image."
"Mine?" I gasped.
He laughed.
"Good Lord, Pope! You always did hate 'em, you know."
"Hate? Who?"
"Women."
I felt myself frowning.
"Women! No, I do not love women and I have some reasons for believing that women do not love me. I have never had any money and my particular kind of pulchritude doesn't appeal to them. Hence their indifference. Hence mine. Like begets like, Jack."
He laughed.
"I have reasons for believing the antipathy is deeper than that."
I shrugged the matter off. It is one which I find little pleasure in discussing.
"You may draw whatever inference you please," I finished dryly.
He lighted a cigarette and inhaled it jubilantly.
"Don't you see," he said, "that it all goes to show that you're precisely the man the governor's looking for? What do you say?"
I hesitated, though every dictate of inclination urged. Here was an opportunity to put to the test a most important theory of the old Socratic doctrine, that true knowledge is to be elicited from within and is to be sought for in ideas and not in particulars of sense. What a chance! A growing youth in seclusion. Such a magnificent seclusion! Where I could try him in my own alembic! Still I hesitated. The imminence of such good fortune made me doubt my own efficiency.
"Suppose I was the wrong man," I quibbled for want of something better to say.
"The executors will have to take their chance on that," he said, rising with the air of a man who has rounded out a discussion. "Come! Let's settle the thing."
Ballard had always had a way with him, a way as foreign to my own as the day from night. From my own point of view I had always held Jack lightly, and yet I had never disliked him--nor did I now--for there was little doubt of his friendliness and sincerity. So I rose and followed him, my docility the philosophy of a full stomach plus the chance of testing the theory of probabilities; for to a man who for six years had reckoned life by four walls of a room and a shelf of books this was indeed an adventure. I was already meshed in the loom of destiny. He led me to a large automobile of an atrocious red color which was standing at the curb, and in this we were presently hurled through the crowded middle city to the lower part of the town, which, it is unnecessary for me to say, I cordially detested, and brought up before a building, the entire lower floor of which was given over to the opulent offices of Ballard, Wrenn and Halloway.
Ballard the elder was tall like his son, but here the resemblance ceased, for while Ballard the younger was round of visage and jovial, the banker was thin of face and repressive. He had a long, accipitrine nose which imbedded itself in his bristling white mustache, and he spoke in crisp staccato notes as though each intonation and breath were carefully measured by their monetary value. He paid out to me in cash a half an hour, during which he questioned and I replied while Jack grinned in the background. And at the end of that period of time the banker rose and dismissed me with much the air of one who has perused a document and filed it in the predestined pigeonhole. I felt that I had been rubber-stamped, docketed and passed into oblivion. What he actually said was:
"Thanks, I'll write. Good afternoon."
The vision of the Great Experiment which had been flitting in rose-color before my eyes, was as dim as the outer corridor where I was suddenly aware of Jack Ballard's voice at my ear and his friendly clutch upon my elbow.
"You'll do," he laughed. "I was positive of it."
"I can't imagine how you reach that conclusion," I put in rather tartly, still reminiscent of the rubber stamp.
"Oh," he said, his eye twinkling, "simplest thing in the world. The governor's rather brief with those he doesn't like."
"Brief! I feel as though I'd just emerged from a glacial douche."
"Oh, he's nippy. But he never misses a trick, and he got your number all O.K."
As we reached the street I took his hand.
"Thanks, Ballard," I said warmly. "It's been fine of you, but I'm sorry that I can't share your hopes."
"Rot! The thing's as good as