“Dad was always so strong on the ethics of a thing,” he began; but Eben Grillage interrupted with a good-natured laugh. “Your father is a white-haired old angel; and he is just about as completely out of touch with the modern business world as the other angels are. There are no theoretical ethics in business, David. If you don’t fight for your own hand, you go to the wall, every time. That is one reason why I offered you a job. I didn’t want to see Adam Vallory’s boy settle down in the old Middleboro Security and become a fossilized back-number before he could grow a beard.” Here it was, deep in the personalities again, and David Vallory would have been either more or less than human if he could have disentangled himself from the purely friendly relation. “You have been mighty good to me--good to all of us,” he broke out gratefully. “If I’ve said too much about that tunnel roof----” “Just you forget the tunnel roof and let it go. It has stood up all right since we drove through it, and you know what it would cost to shoot it down and plug the hole. I want to see you succeed, David, and you can’t do it if you are always worrying about the other fellow’s side of things. I only wish I had a boy like you of my own.” “You have something vastly better,” said the model son, with a smile. “Vinnie, you mean? Sometimes I think so; and then, again, I’m sort of worried. When it comes right down to the jumping-off place, I’m afraid she isn’t going to pick out a sure-enough man. Look at the crowd she runs with! Half of ’em are after my money, and the other half haven’t got brains enough to fry, or sand enough in ’em to keep the wheels from slipping.” David was far enough beyond the tunnel and all other troubles now to be able to laugh happily. It was reasonably evident that any obstacles which might lie in his way in the sentimental race were not such as might be raised by a purse-proud father, and once again his heart warmed toward the benefactor and foster-father who was so generously overlooking the master-and-man hamperings. “Virginia is your own daughter, Mr. Grillage; you needn’t be alarmed about her,” he put in loyally. “I know; but she’s got a raft of high-flown notions about ethical culture--whatever that is--and the brotherhood of man, and ‘tainted money’, and all that--you probably know the whole rigmarole. And when Vinnie sets her head on anything you couldn’t switch her with a hundred-and-fifty-ton crane and a five-yard steam-shovel put together. I tell her what she needs is to marry a man who is in the thick of the business fight for himself--and for her. Then she’d learn a few practical, every-day facts.”