“Somebody has got to spend it,” spoke up the sole heir to the mustard millions, cheerfully. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, pater––you stop making it and I’ll stop spending it. That’s a bargain. It’ll be a great lark for us both. It keeps me awake nights figuring out how I’m going to spend it and it keeps you awake nights puzzling over how you can make it––or, that is, make more of it.”
“Stop!” thundered Joshua Barnes. “For once in my life, Whitney Barnes, I am going to have a serious talk with you. If your poor mother had only lived all this wouldn’t have been necessary. She’d have had you married off and there’d be a houseful of grand-children by this time, and”–––
“Just a moment, pater––did triplets or that sort of thing ever run in our family?”
“Certainly not! What are you driving at?”
“Nothing; nothing, my father. Only I was just wondering. We have a pretty big house, you know.”
For a moment Joshua Barnes seemed on the verge of apoplexy, but he came around quickly, and moreover 23 with a twinkle in his eye. Even a life devoted to mustard has its brighter side and Old Grim Barnes was not entirely devoid of a sense of humor. He was his grim old self again, however, when he resumed:
“Again I insist that you be serious. I intend that you shall be married within a year. Otherwise I will put you to work on a salary of ten dollars a week and compel you to live on it. If you persist in refusing to interest yourself in my business, the business that my grandfather founded and that my father and I built up, you can at least settle down and lead a respectable married life.
“To be candid with you, Whitney,” and Joshua Barnes’s big voice suddenly softened, “I want to see some little grand-children round me before I die. I have some pride of blood, my boy, and I want to see our name perpetuated. You have frivolled enough, Whitney. You are twenty-four. I can honestly thank God that you’ve been nothing more than a fool. You are not vicious.”
“Thanks, awfully, pater. Being nothing more than a fool I suppose it is up to me to get married. Very well, then, I will. Give me your hand, dad; it’s a bargain.”
Whitney Barnes tossed away his cigarette and grasped his father’s hand in both of his. He had become intensely serious. There was a depth of affection in that handclasp that neither father nor son permitted to show above the surface. Yet both felt 24 it keenly within. Picking up his hat and stick, the tall, slim, graceful young man said: