“I’ve been down where people live. Dad, I’ve been back on a farm—just such another farm as gave you the strength to be alive to-day in spite of the way you’ve misused your strength. I’ve been back where trees count for something and where the blue sky is a big item of return for the day’s work. I’ve been back where you still see the sun in the daytime and the stars at night. I’ve been with an old man who expected to have to leave those things—who would then have given every cent he had to stay another day in the midst of it. If you had strewn cook-stoves end to end across the continent, he would not have swapped five breaths of night air for the whole of them.”
The old man scowled up at him as though wondering if he had lost his reason.
“I ought to have taken you along on that walk with me,” ran on Barnes, reminiscently. “It would have shown you what life can mean. You ought to have stood on the hill with me and watched the cotton-blossom clouds. It would have helped you understand that look in mother’s eyes which puzzles you every time you boast of another hundred thousand. You think you are rich and powerful. But listen to this; you haven’t money enough in all your banks to buy one minute of that single week of me. You think I’ve been idle, but let me give you an inventory: five minutes on a hill-top—value five thousand dollars; ten minutes by a letter-box—value ten thousand dollars; a half hour with Aunt Philomela—value thirty thousand dollars; an hour by a trout stream—value one hundred thousand dollars; an hour in the library, value—”
“Bah, you’re a fool!” broke in Barnes, Sr.
“I’ll submit to any jury who’s the greater fool—you or I,” answered Barnes, calmly.
“D’ye think you can live on such dream money as that?” demanded the father.
“Better than you are living on what you have,” declared his son.
He paused a minute and then added soberly.
“My capital would buy for mother what you haven’t been able to buy with yours. It wouldn’t leave her in June staring out of a window at a macadamized road.”
“What’s that?” demanded the father, straightening up.