Jim Watson,—Eleanor’s brother, you remember, and the architect in charge of Morton Hall, also a warm admirer of Morton Hall’s pretty little manager,—had been in Cleveland for a week “on business.” The business was connected with two big houses that his firm were building there. It had left all his evenings and most of his afternoons wholly at the disposal of the Wales’s family cook, alias the pretty little manager of Morton Hall. The cook had rushed through her work in a scandalous fashion that caused the Wales family to indulge in many loud complaints of too-early breakfasts, “snippy” lunches, and wildly extravagant dinners—Jim always got out to Lakeside in plenty of time for the dinners. He had left for New York the night before, after the very most elaborate and delicious dinner of them all, and the Wales’s family cook was tired, though she did not know it, and happy, in spite of a queer lonely sensation that was hopelessly mixed with relief at having a long, lazy afternoon all to herself, to spend with a kitten for company, a book for diversion, and plenty of mending in case the unwonted joys of idleness should pall.
At four, when the postman came by on his afternoon round, Betty was still staring absently off at the blue lake, thinking vague, happy thoughts. She was so absorbed that she never even saw the postman, who obligingly walked across the piazza to her corner and dropped the afternoon mail in her lap, right on top of the gray kitten, who was too sleepy to care.
Just one letter, and it was for Miss B. Wales, the address typewritten, the name of Jasper J. Morton’s world-famous banking house in a corner of the envelope. It was from one of Mr. Morton’s secretaries,—not the Harding graduate that Betty had sent him, but an energetic young man who had been with the firm for several years. It was he to whom Mr. Morton had delegated the task of marketing ploshkins in New York and elsewhere, and he and Betty had become quite friendly over the checks and reorders and other business arrangements.
“I regret to state,” he wrote now, “that the ploshkin market has slumped. Our regular customers all report that they are ‘stuck,’ to use a technical expression of commerce, with the ploshkins they already have on hand, that the demand has entirely dropped off, and that they do not anticipate a revival of it.
“Mr. Morton has asked me to communicate with you, expressing his regret at the sudden termination of so profitable a business. (You will be amused, I know, to hear that the first thing he said was, ‘My, but that relieves my mind. It always worried me to think of people wanting to waste their money on those silly old splashers.’)
“Fortunately the spring sales used up practically all the stock you had on hand, so there will be no losses to meet. But there will also, I fear, be no more profits.
“Mr. Morton respectfully suggests that the ingenious young lady whose name he is unable to recall shall coöperate with you in inventing a new specialty. ‘Most anything will do if it’s only silly enough,’ in Mr. Morton’s opinion; and he will gladly arrange to market the product as he has the ploshkins.
“Hoping anxiously for such a renewal of our business relations, I remain,
“Most respectfully,
“Samuel Stone.”
Betty laughed heartily, all by herself, over Mr. Morton’s characteristic remarks. It was fortunate, she reflected, that when he was cross he was always comical. Otherwise she would never have made friends with him in Europe, and then he would never have built Morton Hall at Harding to please her, nor helped the Tally-ho Tea-Shop out of its very worst trouble,—nor sold the ploshkins. She smiled all to herself at Mr. Samuel Stone’s “anxious hopes,” and frowned as she contemplated the utter impossibility of making the ingenious young lady (named Madeline Ayres) invent a new “specialty” except by some such happy accident as had produced the ploshkin, that comically sad little creature, with an “ingrowing face” that smiled, a prickly, slippery tail, and one wing to hide behind, plaster images of which had been circulated, by the energy and enterprise of Jasper J. Morton and Samuel Stone, from New York to San Francisco, if not further.