“I hear that you have decided to go into the Brightlight Electric,” he observed.
“Signed all the papers this morning,” admitted Bobby.
“Allow me to congratulate you, sir,” said Applerod, but Johnson silently produced from an index case a plain, gray envelope, which he handed to Bobby.
It was inscribed:
To My Son Upon His Putting Good Money Into any Public Service Corporation
and it read:
“When the manipulators of public service corporations tire of skinning the dear public in bulk, they skin individual specimens just to keep in practice. If you have been fool enough to get into the crowd that invokes the aid of dirty politics to help it hang people on street-car straps, just write them out a check for whatever money you have left, and tell your trustee you are broke again; because you are not and never can be of their stripe, and if you are not of their stripe they will pick your bones. Turn a canary loose in a colony of street sparrows and watch what happens to it.”
Bobby folded up the letter grimly and went into his private room, where he thought long and soberly. That evening he went out to Sharpe’s to dinner. As he was about to ring the bell, he stopped, confronted by a most unusual spectacle. Through the long plate-glass of the door he could see clearly back through the hall into the library, and there stood Mrs. Sharpe and William Garland in a tableau “that would have given Plato the pip,” as Biff Bates might have expressed it had he known about Plato. At that moment Sharpe came silently down the stairs and turned, unobserved, toward the library. Seeing that his wife and Garland were so pleasantly engaged, he very considerately turned into the drawing-room instead, and as he entered the drawing-room he lit a cigarette! Bobby, vowing angrily that there could never be room in the Brightlight for both Sharpe and himself, did not ring the bell. Instead, he dropped in at the first public telephone and ’phoned his regrets.
“By the way,” he added, “how soon will you need me again?”
“Not before a week, at least,” Sharpe replied.