“You bet he is!” he vowed. “He has been mighty good to me and to lots of others. He doesn’t understand, that’s all. You are lucky, Esther. Your uncle does understand, or seems to. He was willing for you to go on with your singing.” Her agreement was but partial. “Ye-s,” she said. “Yes, he does understand, in a way. He likes to hear me sing and he helps me to study because it pleases me to do it, you know. Why, the other day I said something about how marvelous it must be to sing in opera. I wish you could have heard him. The things he said about opera and those who sing in it were--well, they were what Nabby Gifford would have called ‘blasphemious.’” Bob laughed at the word, but he was too much in earnest to laugh long. “There you are!” he exclaimed. “That’s it. They don’t understand, either of them. They are like all old people, they belong back in another generation.” He spoke as if Elisha Cook and Foster Townsend were nonogenarians. “Granddad--yes, and your uncle, too, I suppose,” he went on, “were brought up to think that nothing counted but business, buying and selling and getting ahead of the other fellow in a trade, all that sort of stuff. Art and music and--and the rest of it they don’t see at all. Well, I do. I don’t want to be a business man. I want to paint. And I am going to paint. I’ll never be a Rembrandt maybe, but I am making a little progress, so my teachers say, and I’m going to stick at it. Some of these days I shall go to Paris, where the big fellows are. That’s the place--Paris!” She gasped with excitement. “Oh!” she cried. “Are _you_ going to Paris? I am going there, myself, sometime, to study.” “You are! Bully! We can see each other over there, can’t we?” She seemed doubtful. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “My uncle is going to take me there and he--well, I don’t imagine he would be delighted to have you coming to call. You and I belong to--well, to opposite camps, I guess.... I suppose,” she added, thoughtfully, “if he knew you and I were here together now, this minute, he wouldn’t like it a bit. Probably your grandfather wouldn’t be any better pleased.” Bob snorted. “Foolishness!” he declared. “That confounded lawsuit is a nuisance. I’m not going to let it chain me, hand and foot. Why should it? Or you, either? If we want to see each other and talk to each other like--well, like this--I say let’s do it. We aren’t old fossils and we aren’t kids either. I told grand-dad so. _He_ isn’t going to send me to Paris, though,” he added, with a chuckle. “Perhaps he might if I had kept at him--he will do almost anything for me when it comes to the pinch--but he doesn’t have to. I have a little money of my own, it comes to me from my mother’s people. I can spend that as I please and I am spending it on my art studies. If you and I should be in Paris at the same time, we will meet over there. I’ll see that we do. Come now, Esther! Say that you’ll see to it, too. Come! let’s promise.”