“I’d find an excuse to make a road trip, Bill, and go out and see her,” he told me. “But, hang it all, I can’t leave the factory. Dad would have things so snarled up when I got back I’d be six months getting the débris cleared away and things going smoothly again.” Worry weighed the boy down. He grew increasingly irritable and somewhat surly. For hours at a time Johnathan would sit and figure. He would prove to Nathan that on some order made and shipped six months before they had lost two mills of a cent on every carton. Thereupon he declared that Nat’s obstreperousness was heading his father into bankruptcy. (Johnathan never spent hours figuring orders where the firm had cleaned up handsomely and absorbed the losses on lesser ventures.) He would arise in the middle of the night and go down to the shop—after the fires had been lighted in late October—to see if old Mike Hennessy, the watchman, was sleeping on the job. He caught him one night fortifying his courage with a short flat bottle and discharged him on the spot. The help came down next morning to find the fires out. It was noon before the plant was again up to standard. Father and son fought out the question of “hiring and firing” in front of the help—which is an extremely effective method for maintaining respect among employees for the principals in any business—and all this sapped Nat’s vitality. “Thank God you’re twenty-one in a few weeks and my responsibility is ended!” the father swore as he paced the expansive dining room of the sepulchral Longstreet residence. His eyes were wild and his hair was rumpled. He walked with his hands in his pockets and occasionally grabbed up a book or magazine to hurl at his son whose retorts were always so apt, effective and unanswerable that Johnathan had to vent his feelings in action somehow. Then the night when Nathan was twenty-one came,—the epochal date when he was free at last. It was marked by two episodes. The quarrel over Edith and the newspaper clipping I was called upon to give my friend. It was a Saturday night and Edith was taking part in a church concert on the morrow. She had left the house ostensibly to “practice her part” at the home of a friend. Instead of which she had met the Nelson boy and inquiry developed, quite accidentally, that she had “skipped off” to a dance in Wickford. Nathan had taken his sister’s part. The boy, in the exaltation of his majority, had dropped an unfortunate remark: “You’ll be just about as successful in thwarting Edie as you’ve been successful in thwarting me. You think you busted up my engagement to Carol, dad. But you didn’t. Carol went away simply to get her clothes ready. And you might as well know now as any time that I’m marrying her on Christmas day—in exactly three weeks!”