"She hasn't changed you during these last months," Gordon stated, inexorably, "and you mustn't run the risk of making her unhappy. It is a mere business proposition that I am putting before you, Barry. You must be able to support a wife before you marry one, and Washington isn't the place for you to start. In a business like ours, a man must be at his best. You are wasting your time here, and you've acquired the habit of sociability, which is just a habit, but it grows and will end by paralyzing your forces. A man who's always ready to be with the crowd isn't the man that's ready for work, and he isn't the man who's usually onto his job. I am putting this not from any moral or spiritual ideal, but from the commercial. The man who wins out isn't the one with his brain fuddled; he's the one with his brain clear. Business to-day is too keen a game for any one to play who isn't willing to be at it all the time." Thus practical common sense met the boy at every turn. And he was forced at last for pride's sake to consent to Gordon's plans for him. But he had gone to Mary, raging. "Is he going to run our lives?" "He is doing it for your good, Barry." "Why can't I go South with Roger Poole?--if I must go away? He told me of a man who stayed in the woods with him." "That would simply be temporary, and it would delay matters. Gordon's idea is that in this way you'll be established in business. If you went South you'd be without any remunerative occupation." "Doesn't Poole make a living down there?" "He hasn't yet. He's to try story-writing." "Are you corresponding with him, Mary?" Resenting his catechism, she forced herself to say, quietly, "We write now and then." "What does Porter think of that?" "Porter hasn't anything to do with it." "He has, too. You know you'll marry him, Mary." "I shall not. I haven't the least idea of marrying Porter." "Then why do you let him hang around you?" "Barry," she was blazing, "I don't let him hang around. He comes as he has always come--to see us all." "Do you think for a moment that he'd come if it weren't for you? He isn't craving my society, or Aunt Isabelle's, or Susan Jenks'." Barry was glad to blame somebody else for something--he was aware of himself as the blackest sheep in the fold, but let those who had other sins hear them. He flung himself away from her--out of the house. And for days he did not come home. They kept the reason of his absence from Leila, and as far as they could from Constance. But Mary went nearly wild with anxiety, and she found in Gordon a strength and a resourcefulness on which she leaned.