"I know it. If I were in your place I wouldn't hesitate a minute. You are totally at the mercy of the manufacturers unless you can make them understand your ability to take care of yourself. Isn't it true that the great majority of inventors die poor? The manufacturers make the money, not the inventors." "That's true. But I don't want to die poor. I won't die poor. I have not the ambition of a Carnegie or a Rockefeller." "You need a good friend at Washington to protect your interests. My! Won't it be great if your incubator should make you rich! I don't know why it shouldn't. The way the chickens hatched out of it was wonderful. Just think, old man. Most everyone nowadays has electricity in his house. Thousands of people could just as well as not be raising chickens on the side. Ministers, doctors, college professors, newspaper men, lawyers, school teachers,--no end. The sun would never set on your incubator any more than hens have to. I tell you, old man, there's money in your electric birds if you manage the business end of this thing right. And I don't see why your father's offer isn't just--well, providential." "I never knew anything about him to be 'providential,'" said Bauer in almost the only bitter tone Walter had ever known him to use. "But I don't want to take any chances on this. Perhaps he is sent along at this time to help me out." Walter looked curiously at his friend. "You seem to be awfully anxious to make money, Felix. Never knew you that way before. What you going to do? Get married? And start a chicken ranch?" Over Bauer's face a great flood of colour swept. There was one confidence he had determined never to make to Walter, and that was his feelings towards Helen. He believed Walter had no hint of it. And as a matter of fact that was true. Walter had so far had no love experiences and Bauer had never by so much as a look or a word in Walter's presence betrayed his secret. "I don't expect to get married. At least not very soon," Bauer managed to say. "But I want money. You can borrow of me," he added with one of his rare smiles, "if you need it for your own nuptials." "No immediate need," said Walter, laughing. "I have never seen the girl my mother would like to welcome." "Ah! Your mother. But she would be kind to the girl you would choose." "Or the one that would choose me, you mean. I don't know. Mother would be pretty particular about the people that got into the Douglas family. Did I ever mention old man Damon who came around courting Helen last winter. He wears a wig and deals in rubber goods. Old enough to be Helen's father. I never saw mother so upset. And as for Helen--why--I would as soon think of her taking you for a suitor as Damon. But you never can tell what a girl will do. They generally do the opposite of what you expect." Bauer managed to say--"That's fortunate for some of us perhaps. Else there might be no hope for unfortunate and homely people if there was any fixed rules by which girls acted."