The young man smiled. “My father thought it was, but I maintained that I could do as I pleased with my own property. Anyhow he took back his little gift and sent me to a beet-sugar plant out in Michigan, and told me to see if I could keep out of mischief there. Well, the railroads were all giving us special freight rates, and we were fairly coining money and crushing all our competitors to the wall. I told them they must play fair, or I’d expose them. My father was furious,—but I think he was just a little proud too, to find that I couldn’t be taken in. So we had a big pow-wow about the duty of sons and fair play in business, and he finally agreed to give me a free hand here, at the least profitable factory he owns. Whatever profits there are I am to have to improve conditions with, and I can take as long as I like to show my father that it pays to treat your men like human beings.”
“I don’t see the use of fussing so much to prove that,” Babbie told him coldly. “If they don’t like working for him, they can leave, can’t they?”
“If they enjoy starving they can,” Mr. Thayer told her grimly. Then he smiled the smile that Babbie always warmed to in spite of herself. “You’re a capitalist and an employer yourself, Miss Hildreth. If you have such mistaken ideas on the labor question, I think I ought to stop patronizing your firm. You may be abusing the cook.”
“I’m afraid she is overworked days when there’s a rush,” Babbie admitted soberly. “But if she says she’s tired, we always send her home in a carriage, and she calls us all ‘me darlin’.’”
Mr. Thayer threw back his head and laughed. “Then I can certainly patronize you with a clear conscience. I’m so relieved. It would be terrible to have to call off the Christmas party.”
It would indeed have been tragic to call off the Christmas party, with three hundred eager factory hands, not to mention twenty-five homesick college girls, looking forward to it as the great event of the holiday season. The whole college had heard about it, and took a deep and envious interest in the proceedings.
“Just mean of you to give it when I can’t come,” grumbled Georgia.
“Madeline, let us repeat the Pageant of the Twelfth Night Cakes for Dramatic Club’s January meeting,” begged Polly Eastman.
“Make him have another party when we’re here,” put in the fluffy-haired Dutton twin. “It’s hateful of you to keep him all to yourselves.”
College closed at noon on Wednesday, and lunch hour at the Tally-ho was a pell-mell rush of happy, hungry girls, loaded down with suit-cases, running out between courses to look for “that dastardly cabman who said he never in his life was late,” or hailing a passing car with a frantic wave of a sandwich wrapped in a paper napkin. “And it’s all I’ll get till eight to-night,” they assured Betty joyously, for lunch is a small thing when you’re going home for Christmas. Betty reveled in the rush and the gay confusion. She helped little Ruth Howard spirit Lucile Merrifield’s suit-case into a secluded corner to tuck in a mysterious little package tied with holly ribbon. She took orders for belated gifts, repacked bags that simply wouldn’t hold their owner’s left-over note-books and last purchases until she took them in hand. She looked up trains, promised to forward trunk checks that hadn’t come in time, and was here, there, and everywhere until, when she heard the far-away whistle of the two-fifteen, she gave a little sigh of relief and declared that she felt like the distracted centipede in the nonsense rhyme.