He looked at her in wonder.
“I always told you I needed you,” he declared. “When are you going to marry me?”
“When you have won your fight, Bobby, or when you have proved entirely hopeless,” she replied with a smile in which there was a certain amount of wistfulness.
“You’re a good sort, Agnes,” he said a little huskily, and he pondered for some little time in awe over the existence of women like this. “I guess the governor was mighty right in making you my trustee, after all. But what is this business?”
“The Evening Bulletin is for sale, I have learned. Just now it is an independent paper, but it seems to me you could not have a better weapon, with your following, for fighting your political and business enemies.”
“I’ll think that over very seriously,” he said with much soberness. “I have refused everybody’s advice so far, and have taken only my own. I have begun to believe that I am not the wisest person in the world; also I have come to believe that there are more ways to lose money than there are to make money; also I’ve found out that men are not the only gold-brick salesmen. Agnes, I’m what Biff Bates calls a ‘Hick’!”
“Look what your father has to say about this last escapade of yours,” she said, smiling, and from her desk brought him one of the familiar gray envelopes. This was the letter:
To My Daughter Agnes, Upon Bobby’s Entanglement with a Blackmailing Woman
“No man can guard against being roped in by a scheming woman the first time; but if it happens twice he deserves it, and he should be turned out to stay an idiot, for the signs are so plain. A man swindler takes a man’s money and makes a fool of him; but a woman swindler takes a man’s money and leaves a smirch on him. Only a man’s nearest and dearest can help him live down such a smirch; so, Agnes, if my son has been this particular variety of everlasting blank fool, don’t turn against him. He needs you. Moreover, you’ll find him improved by it. He’ll be so much more humble.”
“I didn’t really need that letter,” Agnes shyly confessed; “but maybe it helped some.”