"I want a word with you," he said, "and I'll thank you not to interrupt till I'm done. It seems I've got a son that doesn't approve me. Well, I could bear that, but what I can't bear is to have a son that is fool enough to go about saying so. It seems I'm not good enough to be the father of this son. I'm a scoundrel, so he says, and he says it with my meat in his belly and my clothes on his back. My father was a hard man, and beat me, but I never told other folk what I thought of him. I never went whining to other folk and called my father names. I bore what I had to bear, and kept my mouth shut. But it seems I've got a son that must be talking. Well, I'm going to take care that he talks where I can't hear him. I thought to take him into my business--the more fool I. Business! Let me tell you business needs commonsense, which it seems you haven't got. And business needs a still tongue, which you'll never get, to say nothing of some kind of decent faith between partners, which you haven't a notion of. Partners! Why, let me tell you, I'd sooner take the most ignorant boy in my office and make him my partner than you! He'd at least have commonsense enough to know which side his bread's buttered, which you'll never know. So that's at an end, and you know my mind." "But, father, you are unjust to me. You don't understand." "What don't I understand?" "What was in my thought." "It's not a thing I'm at all anxious to understand," he retorted grimly. "But you must. I won't be condemned unheard." "But you condemned me unheard." This was a shaft that drew blood. It was true, Arthur knew it to be true; he had taken the word of other people against his father. "There were circumstances----" he began. "Circumstances? Every fool pleads circumstances," Masterman interrupted. "Give it the right name, you that are so honest, and say lying gossip." "No, it was not gossip, father." And thereupon he went over the whole story of the illness of Vickars, his visit to Dr. Leet, and the doctor's angry denunciation of the builder of the Lonsdale Road houses as a scoundrel. He spoke with quiet force, and his father listened in perfect silence, but with averted face. "Have you done?" "Yes, father." "Are you sure you've omitted nothing?" "No, that is all." "Well, now listen to me. Dr. Leet may be right or wrong in what he says--I don't know, and I don't care. The only thing I know is that when I built those houses I gave the best value I could at the price. I've told you before that if I am paid a cheap price I give cheap work. All the talking in the world can't upset that position--it's plain business." "But if people die through the cheap work! O father, you can't mean what you say!"