“Babe—that’s the little tomboy who stood up for you against me.” Mr. Morton laughed at the recollection. “She’d be a match for John. She’d make something of him if any one could. But what she can see in him beats me. Oh, he’s a pleasant fellow enough, but he’ll never amount to that, Miss B. A.” Jasper J. Morton snapped his fingers derisively.
They had come out on the water-front and Betty, happening to look ahead, saw that the tide had come in, and with it the ferry-boat, which at that very moment gave a warning whistle.
“Oh, dear, we’ve missed the boat!” she said, “and they only go once an hour.”
“No, we haven’t,” cried Mr. Morton. “What’s the French for ‘Wait’? You tell me and I’ll shout it.” Which he did with such effect that the captain reversed his engines and put back for them.
“Attendez,” repeated Mr. Morton, when he had settled himself on board and caught his breath. “Hope I can remember that. It will be sure to come in handy somewhere. I haven’t any head for languages—never had. Can’t talk to one of my foreign agents without an interpreter.”
“It’s queer that your son should be so fine at languages,” said Betty, glad to get in a word in John’s favor. “We’ve always thought that Madeline Ayres was perfectly remarkable, but she says he is any amount more so.”
“Really?” Mr. Morton’s tone was unpleasantly sceptical. “Well, I don’t know that I ever paid a bill for a tutor in languages, as far as that goes.”
“Oh, these aren’t the kinds you study at college,” Betty explained, “or at least he knows them too, I suppose; but I was thinking of Dutch and Danish and Russian and those queer kinds. He speaks ten different ones, I think he said, and he can understand a few words of some others.”
“This is all news to me,” said Jasper J. Morton drily. “How’d he learn them?”
“Down on some wharves that you own, he said. You do own some wharves, don’t you?”