“What do you expect to do with your life?”
“Don’t you know,” he said, solemnly, “that that’s really a ridiculous question, Mammy? It doesn’t lie with me. I’m a puppet in the hands of Nature. I’m going to be used by a Blind Force—”
“Please don’t joke!”
“I don’t think I am. It seems to me it really is like that. I don’t see much use in spending all your life squirming. I’d rather go along with the rest of the crowd—wherever they’re going. We don’t count much. We’re just one more generation. It’ll take about a billion years to change us or improve us. So what care I?”
“Bertie!” she cried, quite shocked. “Where did you get such ideas?”
“Lance has corrupted me. I was a poor innocent child who wanted to be an engineer and build bridges. But when I was taught to think a million years at a time, I lost interest.”
“But you’ve got to pass your life in some sort of work, dear.”
“I’ll go into Father’s office and show him how to run the show. Then I’ll take a wad and buck the stock market and clean up a few millions and never worry again.”
“Go to bed!” she said, half-laughing. “You’re too silly to talk to! I suppose some time you’ll grow up and be a man. And I hope with all my heart I’ll be able to be proud of you.”
His exploits that week, however, were certainly nothing to be proud of. He took a golden-haired maiden from the hotel out one afternoon and quite wrecked Mr. Pendleton’s car, leaving it helpless on a mountain road to be taken back to the garage on a truck. He ran up a startling bill at the hotel for cigarettes, candies, and “seltzer lemonades” which she suspected strongly, and when she confronted him with it, he said, with chagrin: