“Ask your father,” was Harlan’s response, delivered quietly, though with some irritation; and Martha said sharply that she would, indeed; but this was mere retort, signifying no genuine intention on her part, for she knew well enough what her father would say. He had been saying it over and over, every evening of late; and her discussions with him of Dan Oliphant and “Ornaby Addition” had reached that point of feeble acrimony at which a participant with any remnant of wisdom falls back upon a despairing silence—a silence despairing of the opponent’s sanity. Martha had no mind to release her father from the oppression of this silence of hers, merely to hear him repeat himself. She knew, moreover, that Harlan had not far overshot the mark when he intimated that Dan had become the laughing stock of the town; nor was it grossly an exaggeration to describe him as “making orations to bankers and business men, especially your father.” The enthusiast for “Ornaby Addition” had indeed become somewhat oratorical upon his great subject; and the bankers and business men to whom he made speeches not only laughed about him, as did their secretaries and clerks and stenographers, distributing this humour widely, but often they laughed at him and rallied him, interrupting him as he prophesied coming splendours. “You’ll see!” he would answer, laughing himself, albeit rather plaintively. “You can sit there and make all the fun o’ me you want to, but the day’ll come when you’ll wish you’d had a hand in makin’ this city what it _is_ goin’ to be made! It isn’t only the money you’d get out of it, but the pride you’d take in it, and what you’d be able to tell your grandchildren about it. Why, gentlemen, ten years from now——” Then he would go on painting his air castles for them while they chuckled or sometimes grew noisily hilarious. But the toughest and most powerful of them all declined to chuckle; there was little good-nature and no hilarity left in dry old Mr. Shelby. He was seventy, and, as he crisply expressed himself, at his age he hated to have his time wasted for him; he didn’t see any pleasure in listening to the goings-on of a fool-boy about two minutes out of school! This viewpoint he went so far as to communicate to Dan directly, as the latter stood before him in the old gentleman’s office. For that matter, Mr. Shelby seldom cared to be anything except direct; it was his declared belief that directness was the only thing that paid, in the long run. “Usin’ a lot of tact and all that stuff to spare touchy people’s vanity, it’s all a waste of energy and they only hate you worse in the long run,” he said. “So I’m not goin’ to trouble to use any tact on _you_, young Mr. Dan Oliphant!”