He knew nothing about his father's business affairs, excepting that Mr. Leigh was connected with the Metropolitan National Bank, which was a very rich bank, and that he continued to live in the little house on West Twelfth Street, because it was in that house that Mrs. Leigh had lived her seventeen months of married life--it was where Tommy was bom and where she died. The furniture was chiefly old family pieces which, without his being aware of it, had made Tommy feel at home in the houses of the very wealthy friends he had made at college. It is something to have been American for two hundred years. Family furniture reminds you of it every day. Tommy wondered, curiously rather than anxiously, how much his father would allow him, and whether it would be wiser to argue like a man against its inadequacy or to plead like a boy for an increase; then whether he ought to get it in cash Saturday mornings or to have a checking account at his father's bank. But one thing was certain--he would not be led into reckless check-signing habits. His boy-financier days were over. Those of his friends who had multi-millionaire fathers were always complaining of being hard up. It was, therefore, not an unfashionable thing to be. He surmised that his father was not really rich, because he kept no motor, had no expensive personal habits, belonged to no clubs, and never sent to Tommy at college more money than Tommy asked for, and, moreover, sent it only when Tommy asked. Since his Prep-school days Tommy had spent most of his vacations at boys' houses. Mr. Leigh at times was invited to join him, or to become acquainted with the families of Tommy's friends, but he never accepted. Tommy, having definitely decided not to make any plans until after his first grown-up business talk with his father, looked at himself in the mirror and put on his best serious look. He was satisfied with it. He had successfully used it on mature business men when soliciting advertisements for the college paper. He then decided to breakfast with his father, who had the eccentric habit of leaving the house at exactly eight-forty a.m. It was actually only eight-eight when Tommy entered the dining-room. Maggie, the elderly chambermaid and waitress, in her twenty-second consecutive year of service, whom he always remembered as the only woman who could be as taciturn as his father, looked surprised, but served him oatmeal. It was a warm day in June, but this household ran in ruts. Mr. Leigh looked up from his newspaper. “Good morning, Thomas,” he said. Then he resumed his _Tribune_.