“Why not ask Hodges about it?”
“I don’t want to do that if I can help it. I know just how he’d sneer and throw cold water on it all.”
“Couldn’t you find a partner?”
“I’m not sure that I want to. If I let others into it I’d be afraid they’d freeze me out. Men with more money than he had did that to father lots of times.”
“O, I hope you won’t get cheated, Ben!” She clasped her hands and looked so distressed that he laughed.
“I’ll be too many for them. I’d better paddle my own canoe, though, and then there won’t be any danger.”
“I don’t see why there need be any such thing as cheating in the world.”
“It’s a queer old world. Mother used to say that sometimes she thought it was the lunatic asylum of the universe.”
“I should think, for instance, that in case you work over the old Works and get out the gold, everybody would be glad that you’d succeeded, and would go on with their own work and earn their own money, without wanting to cheat you out of yours.”
“I know, Beth, that’s the fair way to look at it; but all men don’t feel that way. Those that don’t are the ones I’ve got to look out for.”