“What do you mean by spoiling him?”
“You know perfectly well what I mean. He has his own ideas of uprightness and common honesty—or he did have them before he went to work for the company—and they are the right ideas. How long is he going to be able to keep them if you put him in charge of the work in Powder Gap and make him responsible for all the crooked things that are being done?”
“That’s a pretty hard word to fling at your old daddy, Vinnie. Has it reached the point where you can call your father’s business crooked? If I had known that the colleges were going to put that kind of a fad into your head, they wouldn’t have got any of my money—not in a thousand years.”
She shook the head in question despairingly.
“How often must I say that it wasn’t the colleges. It is in the air. A new era is dawning, if we only had eyes to see and ears to hear. As a people we had forgotten that there was such a thing as an American conscience. Some of us are remembering now.”
“Some few impractical college professors and fanatics are making mountains out of molehills!” was the grumbling retort. “You mustn’t be foolish, Vinnie, girl. Competition is the life of trade, and competition means a fight. If we don’t do the other fellow—within reasonable business limits, of course—he’ll do us, and we’ll all go to the poor-farm.”
“We have been over all that before, many times,” said the young woman, with a touch of weariness in her tone. “I don’t ever hope to make you see it as I do—as I can’t help seeing it—but I shouldn’t be your daughter and a Grillage if I refused to make a fight for David.”
For some little time the grizzled giant in the wide-armed chair made no reply. He had picked up a paper-knife and was absently passing it through his thick, square-ended fingers in the manner of one testing the keenness of an edged tool. Finally he said: “Is David the man, Vinnie?”
She did not affect to misunderstand him.
“There isn’t any ‘the man’ yet. I like the grown-up David, partly because he has kept the promise of the little-boy David, and partly because he is so different from the others. He needs an alert, wide-awake sister to look after him much more than he does a wife. Besides, he’s already in love with—some girl.”