“I should say not! Why, I saved a lot while we were staying in Oban. Besides I wouldn’t take that way to get it,—I’d ask right out, as I generally do. It’s so maddening to have him always assume as a matter of course that a fellow’s in the wrong.”
“Is he that way about everything?”
John nodded. “I told you how he hated this vacation that he’s taking. He enjoys grumbling over things as much as you or I enjoy laughing about them.”
“Just like the funny old gentleman we met in Grasmere,” said Babe. “Why, John, is your father’s name Jasper J. Morton?”
John nodded. “Just suits him, too.”
“Why, then he was the very one we met.” Babe laughed delightedly. “Didn’t I write you anything about it? Well, it was this way.” She gave a brief sketch of the encounter, ending with, “He may be hard to get along with sometimes, John, but he’s an old dear just the same. Betty thinks so, too. She saw more of him than I did.”
“Well, we don’t hit it off somehow, he and I.” John’s tone was as gloomy as ever. “I feel sometimes as if I might as well stop trying to please him. Makes you envy a chap like Billy Benson who’s always done about as he pleased and now is absolutely his own master. I’m six months older than Billy, but my being of age doesn’t make the least difference in the way my father treats me, and now I’ve done my level best this summer, and that hasn’t made the least difference either.”
“Oh, but it must in the end,” Babe reassured him cheerfully. “You’ll feel better after you’ve had some tea.”
But John refused to be cheered, though Billy Benson and Madeline gave absurd imitations of English people taking tea, and Billy read a thrilling letter from the captain of the Harvard crew, which made all the girls as eager as Babbie had been to come back in September for the race.
“I shan’t see that race,” John confided in low tones to Babe. “I bet you all the money I saved in Oban against your blue tie that my father chooses that particular day to sail from Liverpool.”