"It is absurd," he explained to her. "This is the first dividend-paying investment I have been able to make so far, and I'm going to keep it up just as long as I can make money out of it. I'd be very foolish if I didn't. Besides, this is just a little in-between flyer, while I'm conservatively waiting for a good, legitimate opening. It can take, at most, but a very small part of my two hundred and fifty thousand." Agnes, though defending him against his father, was still reluctant about the trip, but suddenly, with a curious smile, she withdrew all objections and even urged him to go ahead. "Bobby," said she, still with that curious smile and strangely shining eyes, and putting both her hands upon his shoulders, "I see that you must go ahead with this. I--I guess it will be good for you. Somehow, I think that this is to be your last folly, that you are really learning that the world is not all polo and honor-bets. So go ahead--and I'll wait here." He could not know how much that hurt her. He only knew, after she had talked more lightly of his trip, that he had her full and free consent, and, highly elated with his first successful business venture, he took up the contracts of the Neapolitan Grand Opera Company where Signor Matteo, the decamped manager and producer, had dropped them. The members of the company having attached the scenery and effects for back salaries, sold them to Bobby for ten thousand dollars, and he immediately found himself confronted by demands for settlements, with the alternative of damage suits, from the two cities in which the company had been booked for the two past weeks. Had Bobby not bound himself irrevocably to contracts which made him liable for the salaries of every member of this company for the next twenty weeks, he would have withdrawn instantly at the first hint of these suits; but, now that he was in for it, he promptly compromised them at a rate which made Spratt furious. "If I'd thought," said Spratt angrily in the privacy of the Orpheum office, "that you were sucker enough to get roped in for the full season, I'd have tossed you out of the running for this week. This game is a bigger gamble than the Stock Exchange. The smartest producers in the business never know when they have a winner or a loser. More than that, while all actors are hard to handle, of all the combinations on earth, a grand opera company is the worst. I'll bet a couple of cold bottles that before you're a week on the road you'll have leaks in your dirigible over some crazy dramatic stunts that are not in the book of any opera of the Neapolitan repertoire."