Paradise Garden | Page 3

it?"
"I?" I said, a little bewildered. "What makes you think I'm qualified for
such an undertaking?"
"Because you were the best scholar in the class, and because you're a

blessed philosopher with leanings toward altruism. A poor helpless
little millionaire with no one to lean on must certainly excite your pity.
You're just the man for the job, I tell you. And if you said you'd do it,
you'd put it over."
"And if I couldn't put 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.