"He has genius, you know." "You mean his fiddle?" Tom said, incredulously. "I mean his music. We'll hear of him one of these days." "I don't care much whether we ever hear from his music," he said, "but I wish I could hear that he was applying himself to business." "Business!" cried Helen Hayes. "What is business compared to Art?" Thomas looked over at Mr. Hayes in astonishment, for in those days, in Old Chester, this particular sort of talk had not been heard; the older man sneered and changed his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other. Miss Hayes did not get much sympathy from her family. But she went on with pretty dogmatism: "You see, in a man like your son--" "A man! He's only twenty, my dear young lady." "In a _man_, sir! like your son--genius is the thing to consider; and you owe it to the world to let genius have its fullest play. Don't bring Pegasus down to plough Old Chester cornfields. Why, it seems to me," said Helen Hayes, "that he ought to be allowed to just soar. We common folk ought to do the ploughing." "Thunder an' guns!" said Tom Dilworth. "I don't care if he can't be sure that two and two make four," cried Miss Helen (Thomas, bubbling into aggrieved confidence on this sore subject, had alleged this against his son); "he can put four notes together that open the gates of heaven. And he'll distinguish himself in music, because his father's son is bound to have tremendous perseverance and energy." Old Mr. Hayes snorted and spat into the fire; but Miss Helen's look when she said "his father's son" made Mr. Thomas Dilworth simper. "That girl has sense," he said to himself as he walked home at a quarter to eleven. But he only told Mrs. Dilworth that she had better hint to Ned to be a little more backward in coming forward. "That Hayes girl is nice to him on our account," said Tom, "but he needn't bore her to death. Milly, why don't you have one of those pink wrappers? She had one on to-night. Loose, you know, and trimmed down the front." "A wrapper isn't very suitable for company," Mrs. Dilworth said, briefly. "It didn't matter with you, because you're an old married man; but she oughtn't to go round in wrappers when Neddy's there." "Why, it was a sort of party dress--all lace and stuff. I wish you had one like it. As for Ned, he's a babe; and her wrapper thing was perfectly proper, of course. Can't you ask her for the pattern?" And then Thomas went to sleep and dreamed of a large order for galvanized buckets; but his Milly lay awake a long time, wondering how she could get a pink dress; pleased, in her silent way, that Tom should be thinking about her clothes; but with a slow resentment gathering in her heart that Helen Hayes's clothes should have suggested his thought. "And pink isn't my color," she thought, a vision of her own mild, red face rising in her mind. Still, a fresh pink lawn--"that's always pretty," Milly Dilworth said to herself, earnestly. III