They held him back. But not for long. He was the most irritatingly impatient of convalescents. In due course of time the family was redistributed about the face of the earth. Ethelwolf was at preparatory school; Beatrice and Consuelo were acquiring and lending luster at Wellesley and Vassar; Gerald was painting a portrait at Washington; and J. Pennock was like a returned Napoleon in Wall Street. Pop was at his desk in the store. All his employees had gone home. He was fretfully twiddling a telegram from San Francisco: Julie's address sublime please telegraph two hundred more love MERE. Pop was remembering the words of the address: "Woman has been for ages man's mere beast of burden.... Being a wife has meant being a slave." Pop could not understand it yet. But he told everybody he met about the first three words of the telegram, and added: "I got the smartest children that ever was and they owe it all to their mother, every bit." BABY TALK I The wisest thing Prof. Stuart Litton was ever caught at was the thing he was most ashamed of. He had begun to accumulate knowledge at an age when most boys are learning to fight and to explain at home how they got their clothes torn. He wore out spectacles almost as fast as his brothers wore out copper-toed boots; but he did not begin to acquire wisdom until he was just making forty. Up to that time, if the serpent is the standard, Professor Litton was about as wise as an angleworm. He submerged himself in books for nearly forty years; and then--in the words of Leonard Teed--then he "came up for air." This man Teed was the complete opposite of Litton. For one thing he was the liveliest young student in the university where Litton was the solemnest old professor. Teed had scientific ambitions and hated Greek and Latin, which Litton felt almost necessary to salvation. Teed regarded Litton and his Latin as the sole obstacles to his success in college; and, though Litton was too much of a gentle heart to hate anybody, if he could have hated anybody it would have been Teed. A girl was concerned in one of their earliest encounters, though Litton's share in it was as unromantic as possible. Teed, it seems, had violated one of the rules at Webster University. He had chatted with Miss Fannie Newman--a pretty student in the Woman's College--after nine o'clock; nay, more, he had sat on a campus bench bidding her good night for half an hour, and, with that brilliant mathematical mind of his, had selected the bench at the greatest possible distance from the smallest cluster of lampposts.