“Huh?” snorted Crooks. “If I did I didn’t leave it in the middle of the hall. I put it out of the way behind the hatrack. Somebody moved it out. That’s only one thing. There’s a hundred others. You’ve got enough truck to start a china shop or a jewellery store or a whitewear sale!”
“I don’t get married every summer,” his daughter returned placidly. “We have to have things. And then our friends are good to us. I know one darling old grouch who gave me a big cheque. Remember what he told me to do with it?”
“I didn’t need to tell you. You can get away with a cheque without instructions. Never knew a woman who couldn’t.”
“You told me to ‘blow it’ on myself—not to put a dollar of it into house furnishings.”
“Suppose I did! You don’t need house furnishings. There’s two houses ready furnished for you—this one and Kent’s. How many blamed houses do you want to live in, anyway?”
“Oh, Heavens, Joe, give him a cigar!” exclaimed Jack at the end of her patience. “He’s going to be an awful crank of a father-in-law.”
Crooks took Joe’s cigar and dropped into a chair, while Jack departed in search of refreshment; men being, as she declared, invariably hungry when they were not thirsty.
“I’ve been thinking, Joe,” said the old lumberman, “quite a bit about my business lately.”
“Why, what’s the matter with it?” asked Joe in surprise, for Crooks’s business, like his own, had been very good indeed.
“Nothing’s the matter with it,” Crooks replied. “It’s good—it’s too good. I’ve run it for a long time, and now it’s beginning to run me.”