"Oh, cops are idiots!" he chuckled arrogantly and looked toward Alicia with a haughty proprietorial air. "They don’t know _anything_! Didn’t take me long to dope out where to look for ’Licia," he boasted. "I figured it out like this: ’Licia is bugs on your old books. She was looking for a job to earn her own living, wasn’t she?" Alicia bent her head, still shamefaced over the episode. "What’d I do? I’m strong on engines. Wouldn’t I go to a place where they make or sell engines? Well, with her it was books. I went around to some book places—’n’ then suddenly I had a hunch: Andrews—that you and she always jaw about. I looked him up in the ’phone book. An’ sure enough, when I went round and peeped in through the door, I saw Alicia upon a ladder handling some of those old books there. I thought I’d go in and call her down, but then I thought ’t would surprise her more if you and I came in on her together—and I beat it hot-foot to a ’phone. Cops!—They’d say, Baltimore—South America—anything, so it sounds good!" And again his glance wholly appropriated Alicia. The youngster seems to think he invented her. But I am full of gratitude to that boy. The closure of the Stock Exchange and the abrupt slowing up of financial business has filtered like a shadow even into Visconti’s and is giving me some unhurried hours in which to ponder the future. How many middle-aged bachelors, I wonder, have conjured similar visions, constructed the same castles of thin air? To educate Alicia, to serve and to love her until my love surrounds her so that she cannot choose but return it—to create a woman Pygmalion-like out of this very sweet Galatea—what could be more blissful? Alicia is now in her teens. But suppose she were sweet-and-twenty, could she ever think with anything but filial affection of a man nearly twice her age who stands to her in _loco parentis_? Like a lovesick boy who pulls at the faint intimations of his mustache and searches the newspaper for cases of marriage at seventeen, I eagerly scan the prints and cudgel my memory for such unions as ours would be. But the papers are filled with war and rumors of war. It comes to me suddenly that a certain aged Senator has not so long ago married his ward, under even a greater disparity of ages—and I am absurdly happy. I see myself with Alicia matured and radiant, ever young—living a life of bright serenity, calling endearing names. "Did I hear it half in a doze Long since, I know not where? Did I dream it an hour ago, When asleep in this arm-chair?" But this is folly. Tennyson is out of fashion and there are greater fools than old fools. I ask too much of the high gods. Enough has already been given to a crusty bookworm like me. Suppose I had married Gertrude! The children’s voices would never have made music for my ears. Nevertheless, Alicia shall have the best education I can give her.