California, Southern -- Fiction; Motion picture industry -- Fiction; Petroleum industry and trade -- Fiction; Political fiction
He told Bertie about Paul, and what a wonderful fellow he was, but
Bertie said just what Dad had said, that Paul was “crazy.” More than
that, she became angry, she thought that Paul was a “horrid fellow,” she
was glad Bunny hadn’t been able to find him again. That was an attitude
which Bertie was to show to Paul all through Paul’s life; she showed it
at the very first instant, and poor Bunny was utterly bewildered. But in
truth, it was hardly reasonable to expect that Bertie, who was going to
school in order to learn to admire money—to find out by intuition
exactly how much money everybody had, and to rate them
accordingly—should be moved to admiration by a man who insisted that
you had no right to money unless you had earned it!
Bertie was following her nature, and Bunny followed his. The anger of
his sister had the effect of setting Paul upon a lonely eminence in
Bunny’s imagination; a strange, half-legendary figure, the only person
who had ever had a chance to get some of Dad’s money, and had refused
it! Every now and then Bunny would stop by and sit on a rabbit-hutch,
and ask Mrs. Groarty for news about her nephew. One time the stout lady
showed him a badly scrawled note from Ruth Watkins—Paul’s sister, whom
he loved—saying that the family had had no word; also that they were
having a hard time keeping alive, they were having to kill a goat now
and then—and Mrs. Groarty said that was literally eating up their
capital. Later on there was another letter from Ruth, saying that Paul
had written to her; he was up north, and still on the move, so no one
could get hold of him; he sent a five-dollar bill in a registered
letter, and specified that it was to go for food, and not for missions.
It wasn’t easy to save money when you were only getting a boy’s pay,
Paul said; and again Bunny was moved to secret awe. He went off and did
a strange secret thing—he took a five-dollar bill, and folded it
carefully in a sheet of paper, and sealed it up in a plain envelope, and
addressed it to “Miss Ruth Watkins, Paradise, California,” and dropped
it into a mail-box.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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