“Any way you look at it, it makes a big hole in the day; and there’s not much use in the ragged rim left. You say you’re dining out next Sunday? Then I forbid you to come over here for lunch. Do you understand me, sir? You disobey at the risk of your father’s malediction! Where did you say you were dining? With the Waltham Bankshires again? Why, that’s the second time in three weeks, ain’t it? Big blow-out, I suppose? Gold plate and orchids--opera singers in afterward? Well, you’d be in a nice box if there was a fog on the river, and you got hung up half-way over. That’d be a handsome return for the attention Mrs. Bankshire has shown you--singling out a whipper-snapper like you twice in three weeks! (What’s the daughter’s name--Daisy?) No, _sir_--don’t you come fooling round here next Sunday, or I’ll set the dogs on you. And you wouldn’t find me in anyhow, come to think of it. I’m lunching out myself, as it happens--yes sir, _lunching out_. Is there anything especially comic in my lunching out? I don’t often do it, you say? Well, that’s no reason why I never should. Who with? Why, with--with old Dr. Bleaker: Dr. Eliphalet Bleaker. No, you wouldn’t know about him--he’s only an old friend of your mother’s and mine.” Gradually Ronald’s insistence became less difficult to overcome. With his customary sweetness and tact (as Mr. Grew put it) he began to “take the hint,” to give in to “the old gentleman’s” growing desire for solitude. “I’m set in my ways, Ronny, that’s about the size of it; I like to go tick-ticking along like a clock. I always did. And when you come bouncing in I never feel sure there’s enough for dinner--or that I haven’t sent Maria out for the evening. And I don’t want the neighbors to see me opening my own door to my son. That’s the kind of cringing snob I am. Don’t give me away, will you? I want ‘em to think I keep four or five powdered flunkeys in the hall day and night--same as the lobby of one of those Fifth Avenue hotels. And if you pop over when you’re not expected, how am I going to keep up the bluff?” Ronald yielded after the proper amount of resistance--his intuitive sense, in every social transaction, of the proper amount of force to be expended, was one of the qualities his father most admired in him. Mr. Grew’s perceptions in this line were probably more acute than his son suspected. The souls of short thick-set men, with chubby features, mutton-chop whiskers, and pale eyes peering between folds of fat like almond kernels in half-split shells--souls thus encased do not reveal themselves to the casual scrutiny as delicate emotional instruments. But in spite of the dense disguise in which he walked Mr. Grew vibrated exquisitely in response to every imaginative appeal; and his son Ronald was perpetually stimulating and feeding his imagination.