"Yes—your mother—I had forgotten!"
"Naturally, I preferred to use that, when I was of so little service to you unless I got strong, as you said," Jack said, very quietly.
Now came another silence, the silence of luminous, unsounded depths concealing that in the mind which has never been spoken or even taken form. Jack's garden of words had dried up, as his ranch would dry up for want of water. He rose to go, groping for something that should express proper contrition for wasted years, but it refused to come. He picked up the rose and the hat, while the father regarded him with stony wonder which said: "Are you mine, or are you not? What is the nature of this new strength? On what will it turn?"
For Jack's features had set with a strange firmness and his eyes, looking into his father's, had a steady light. It seemed as if he might stalk out of the office forever, and nothing could stop him. But suddenly he flashed his smile; he had looked about searching for a talisman and found it in the rose, which set his garden of words abloom again.
"This room is so bare it must be lonely for you," he said. "Wouldn't it be a good idea to cheer it up a bit? To have this rose in a vase on your table where you could see it, instead of riding about in an empty automobile box?"
"Why, there is a whole cold storage booth full of them down on the first floor!" said the father.
"Yes, I saw them in their icy prison under the electric light bulbs. The beads of water on them were like tears of longing to get out for the joy of their swan song under a woman's smiles or beside a sick bed," said Jack, in the glow of real enthusiasm.
"Good line for the ad writer!" his father exclaimed, instinctively. "You always did have fanciful ideas, Jack."
"Yes, I suppose I have!" he said, with some surprise and very thoughtfully. "I suppose that I was born with them and never weeded them out."
"No doubt!" and the father frowned.