"How much has your father ever helped you, Jimmie?" "Not much. We've always been poor, you know." "Because he drank?" "Yes, he never could keep a job but so long." "Not even when you were small?" "I wasn't with him then. When my mother got--when she left him, she took me with her. Then she died, and I was with my grandmother awhile, then I lived with him until I came here." "Are you very fond of him?" "No, Frank, I'm not; not a bit. He never did anything for my mother or for me, to make me." "I don't see why you lived with him then." "He'd behave himself better. I had a sort of influence over him. He was afraid of me, or ashamed, or something, and I stuck to him to keep him straight. But, oh! I hated it, and when he got going all right, I cut loose and came here." "What sort is the old lady? W. C. T. U. and all that kind of thing, I suppose?" "Something on that order." The Oracle leaned forward until his chest came almost between his bent knees, as was his wont when he clinched his arguments. "I suppose you've never figured it out that people of her way of thinking would call what little drinking you do at Mayfield 'drinking in low saloons?'" By his silence Jimmie admitted that there was something in the position. Frank followed up his lead. "So it may be nothing very bad after all. But let's suppose it is; suppose he has slid back into the worst of his old ways, is it going to pay to go on and break things all up for yourself, for the purpose of trying to bolster him up? It seems to me you would let your enthusiasm get away with your common sense. But it's your business, Jimmie. Only the thing that gets me is the blooming uselessness of it all. What can you do?" "I can work." "You could do that before you came here. You see, it was all right before, when your plans weren't formed. Now it means not only his sliding back, but yours too. You know as well as I do that a half-baked man isn't worth a whoop, not a solitary whoop. You've got to drop down into mediocrity just when you are on the way up to something. And after sacrificing yourself, perhaps, it will have been for nothing. You can't cure that thing in a month, nor a year, nor two years. If he is drinking, regular and hard, you've got to catch him and stay with him just about as long as he lives. You can't leave him after you get him on his feet, or he'll go right back. You know that from experience, don't you?" "Yes," said Jimmie. The Senior's words came to him as a relief. He had begun the conversation with the feeling that the thing for him to do was to go home, and dreading lest Lyman should think so, too. Now Frank showed him the folly of such a step, and Frank knew about things. "It means a knockout to your ambition," went on Lyman, "the spoiling of yourself, and you propose to do this for a man you don't care for? I don't understand."