Nevertheless, Gordon at twenty-six was giving Amos not a little anxiety. While a few wild oats were expected of a boy to show that he was a boy and virile—in fact, Amos had rolled in a wild oat or two himself when a boy or when his wife was occasionally elsewhere—it didn’t necessarily follow that the son should turn wholesale agriculturist and rear elevators with the family money in which to house his disturbing grain crops. Not that it offended Amos’s sense of decency—the things he had to pay for, from broken china to broken women—so much as it affected the family prestige. It was time the boy calmed down, and the boy gave no symptoms whatever of calming down. He had, in fact, calmed upward considerably of late and grown a little out of hand,—if indeed he ever was in hand. Thereat Amos, like most of his type, looking into his own experience for solution, hit upon the brilliant idea that what Gordon needed most of all to straighten him out was a brainy, strong-minded wife. The very thing. Gordon must have a wife. Then a baby or two. If a baby or two couldn’t tone Gordon down then nothing could tone Gordon down. Amos would speak to his son about it. Which, on a winter’s evening in March, 1915, he did. Gordon was talking about going to France and “guttin’ Fritzies” for the fun of it, and that must be nipped at any cost. Why, the boy might get shot. Amos was especially peeved at the Germans and the war, anyhow—it was making a continental colander out of all his favorite watering places and spoiling his annual trips abroad by filling the seas with submarines that actually blew people up. Not that Gordon cared anything about the moral aspects of the war. Such a venture merely promised a new thrill. Amos called his boy into the big Ruggles library, had a Scotch and soda with him, lighted a big cigar and assumed a place on the hearth rug with one hand behind his coat tails. There he rocked on his toes and heels and became the Declaiming Parent. II “Marry!” cried Gordon. “Who the devil will I marry? Those I might marry I don’t want—I can have ’em any old day. And those I do want I can’t have, because they won’t have me. So damn all women, anyhow.” “Tut, tut, sir!” cried Amos. “Your mother is a woman, understand!” “Gad, so she is! Well, well! We’ll make an exception of her. Damn all the others—excepting——” “I’d like to know,” declaimed Amos grandly, as he had expounded his two-child-a-family bill before the legislature, “I’d like to know, sir, where the woman is you might want that you can’t have? Tut, tut, sir! Do not let us fritter away our time with nonsense.” “If you want to know straight, Pop, there’s only one skirt in these whole United States I could ever care two hamstrings for. But she’s about as interested in me as that Frances Willard dame would be to sit in on a bock-beer convention.”