At the moment, David did not attach any special importance to this remark of Plegg’s about Mr. Grillage’s attitude. But if he could have turned the leaves of the book of days backward to the night of his stay at the lakeside mansion of the lavishnesses, the explanation would have synchronized itself quite accurately with his retreat to his room in The Maples and the departure of the last of the bridge-playing dinner guests. At the door-closing upon the final couple, Miss Virginia had sought her father in his den. By this time the private secretary had been dismissed and the king of the contractors was alone. “Hello, Vinnie, girl!” he rumbled. “Come to tell the old daddy good-night?” “Partly,” was the crisp rejoinder. “But mostly it’s about David. You have decided to send him to the Timanyoni, in spite of my little protest?” Eben Grillage’s laugh resembled nothing so much as the rasping of circular saws, but he meant it to be good-natured. He could hold no other attitude toward the daughter whom David, in his talk with his father, had characterized as the apple of his eye. “You women are too much for me, Vinnie. You like David, and you want to see him get ahead. But when I hunt out a good place for him, you suddenly take a notion that you don’t want him to have it. What’s the particular reason?” It was at this point that the young woman had taken a chair at the opposite side of the broad working table where she sat facing her father. “If I thought I could make you understand,” she said, half musingly. And then: “I do like David and I respect him. It seems such a needless pity to spoil him, don’t you think?” “What do you mean by spoiling him?” “You know perfectly well what I mean. He has his own ideas of uprightness and common honesty--or he did have them before he went to work for the company--and they are the right ideas. How long is he going to be able to keep them if you put him in charge of the work in Powder Gap and make him responsible for all the crooked things that are being done?” “That’s a pretty hard word to fling at your old daddy, Vinnie. Has it reached the point where you can call your father’s business crooked? If I had known that the colleges were going to put that kind of a fad into your head, they wouldn’t have got any of my money--not in a thousand years.” She shook the head in question despairingly. “How often must I say that it wasn’t the colleges. It is in the air. A new era is dawning, if we only had eyes to see and ears to hear. As a people we had forgotten that there was such a thing as an American conscience. Some of us are remembering now.” “Some few impractical college professors and fanatics are making mountains out of molehills!” was the grumbling retort. “You mustn’t be foolish, Vinnie, girl. Competition is the life of trade, and competition means a fight. If we don’t do the other fellow--within reasonable business limits, of course--he’ll do us, and we’ll all go to the poor-farm.”