"And that I get my Saturday night bath," Dick amplified meekly for him. "Precisely." "How much are you--am I--paying the lady for her services?" Dick questioned in the disconcerting, tangential way that was already habitual to him, as his school companions and teachers had learned to their cost. Mr. Crockett for the first time cleared his throat for pause. "I'm paying her, ain't I?" Dick prodded. "Out of the twenty million, you know." "The spit of his father," said Mr. Slocum in an aside. "Mrs. Summerstone, the lady as you elect to call her, receives one hundred and fifty a month, eighteen hundred a year in round sum," said Mr. Crockett. "It's a waste of perfectly good money," Dick sighed. "And board and lodging thrown in!" He stood up--not the born aristocrat of the generations, but the reared aristocrat of thirteen years in the Nob Hill palace. He stood up with such a manner that his Board of Guardians left their leather chairs to stand up with him. But he stood up as no Lord Fauntleroy ever stood up; for he was a mixer. He had knowledge that human life was many-faced and many-placed. Not for nothing had he been spelled down by Mona Sanguinetti. Not for nothing had he fought Tim Hagan to a standstill and, co-equal, ruled the schoolyard roost with him. He was birthed of the wild gold-adventure of Forty-nine. He was a reared aristocrat and a grammar-school-trained democrat. He knew, in his precocious immature way, the differentiations between caste and mass; and, behind it all, he was possessed of a will of his own and of a quiet surety of self that was incomprehensible to the three elderly gentlemen who had been given charge of his and his destiny and who had pledged themselves to increase his twenty millions and make a man of him in their own composite image. "Thank you for your kindness," Young Dick said generally to the three. "I guess we'll get along all right. Of course, that twenty millions is mine, and of course you've got to take care of it for me, seeing I know nothing of business--" "And we'll increase it for you, my boy, we'll increase it for you in safe, conservative ways," Mr. Slocum assured him. "No speculation," Young Dick warned. "Dad's just been lucky--I've heard him say that times have changed and a fellow can't take the chances everybody used to take." From which, and from much which has already passed, it might erroneously be inferred that Young Dick was a mean and money-grubbing soul. On the contrary, he was at that instant entertaining secret thoughts and plans so utterly regardless and disdainful of his twenty millions as to place him on a par with a drunken sailor sowing the beach with a three years' pay-day. "I am only a boy," Young Dick went on. "But you don't know me very well yet. We'll get better acquainted by and by, and, again thanking you...."