“I think you will have no difficulty in living up to the Joe my father found to-day.”
“I think it wise to idealize the boy as far as possible,” he said.
Miss Van Patten served him with salad and a portion of the damson preserves.
“But there are certain details,” he persisted.
“If you’re going to idealize Joe, you’d better leave out the details,” advised Aunt Philomela.
“I referred more particularly to the historical details,” he answered. “There is for instance the question of my age.”
“You will be twenty-three next October,” Aunt Philomela condescended to inform him.
“Thank you. Then I suppose I ought to know the ages of—my relatives.”
“Which matches well with your other presumptions,” answered the aunt with heat.
But here Miss Van Patten took the matter into her own hands and sketched for him as delicately as possible the brief career of this only son. She told first a little something of the mother who had been dead ten years now and of the blow this was to the father. Mr. Van Patten had practically retired, when this occurred, from the bank where he had for so long been president. For a few years they lived on in New York, with Aunt Philomela, her mother’s sister, filling the gap as best she could. Joe even as a child had been hard to handle and when he grew up became very willful. He did not like school and so Mr. Van Patten, when the boy was sixteen, found a position for him in the bank. But he was restless there and did not stay long. He tried one thing after another without success and finally when rebuked by his father, left home altogether. During these years she herself had been away at school and so had seen little of her brother. After the boy left, her father broke down and upon the advice of the doctors came back here in the hills. They had been here now five years living very much to themselves. From time to time they had heard from the boy in his wanderings, locating him a few months ago in Alaska.