"We didn’t actually have the _row_," Langdon sighed, "but it would have come if I hadn’t lit out before he got back from Savannah. The truth is"—the visitor dropped his eyes—"he has allowed me almost no pocket-money of late, and, getting in a tight place—debts, you know, and one thing and another—I let my best horse go at a sacrifice the other day. Father likes to ride him, and he’s going to raise sand about it. Oh, I couldn’t stand it, and so I came away. It will blow over, you know, but it will do so quicker if I’m here and he’s there. Besides, he is always nagging me about having no profession or regular business, and if I see a fair opening down here, I’m really going to work." "You’ll never do it in this world." Sively laughed, and his dark eyes flashed merrily as he pulled at his well-trained mustache. "You can no more do that sort of thing than a cat-fish can hop about in a bird-cage. In an office or bank you’d simply pine away and die. Your ancestors lived in the open air, with other people to work for them, and you are simply too near that period to do otherwise. I know, my boy, because I’ve tried to work. If I didn’t have private interests that pin me down to a sort of routine, I’d be as helpless as you are." "You are right, I reckon." Langdon reached out to the copper bowl on the table and took a cigar. "I know, somehow, that the few business openings I have heard of now and then have simply sickened me. When I get as much city life as is good for me down here, I like to run back to the mountains. Up there I can take my pipe and gun and dog and—" "And enjoy life right; you bet you can," Sively said, enthusiastically. "Well, after all, it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. My life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be by men who say they are yearning for it. Between you and me, I feel like a defunct something or other when I hear these thoroughly up-to-date chaps talking at the club about their big enterprises which they are making go by the very skin of their teeth. Why, I know one fellow under thirty who has got every electric car-line in the city tied to the tips of his fingers. I know another who is about to get Northern backing for a new railroad from here to Asheville, which he started on nothing but a scrap of club writing-paper one afternoon over a bottle of beer. Then there is that darned chap from up your way, Luke King. He’s a corker. He had little education, I am told, and sprang from the lowest cracker stock, but he’s the sensation of the hour down here." "He’s doing well, then," Langdon said, a touch of anger in his tone as he recalled Virginia’s reference to King on their last meeting.