“When shrewd men persist in passing up an apparently cinch proposition, don’t even try to find out what’s the matter with it. In this six-cylinder age no really good opportunity runs loose for twenty-four hours.”
“If the governor had only arranged to leave me his advice beforehand instead of afterward,” Bobby complained to Agnes Elliston that evening, “it might have a chance at me.”
“The blow has fallen,” said Agnes with mock seriousness; “but you must remember that you brought it on yourself. You have complained to me of your father’s carefully-laid plans for your course in progressive bankruptcy, and he left in my keeping a letter for you covering that very point.”
“Not in a gray envelope, I hope,” groaned Bobby.
“In a gray envelope,” she replied firmly, going across to her own desk in the library.
“I had feared,” said Bobby dismally, “that sooner or later I should find he had left letters for me in your charge as well as in Johnson’s, but I had hoped, if that were the case, that at least they would be in pink envelopes.”
She brought to him one of the familiar-looking missives, and Bobby, as he took it, looked speculatively at the big fireplace, in which, as it was early fall, comfortable-looking real logs were crackling.
“Don’t do it, Bobby,” she warned him smiling. “Let’s have the fun together,” and she sat beside him on the couch, snuggling close.
The envelope was addressed:
To My Son Upon his Complaining that His Father’s Advice Comes too Late!