“Oh, I can read all there is here and welcome,” the boy explained, stepping toward the window to decipher the label on a bundle of roots in his hand, “but that's no good unless there's regular practice coming into the office all the while. THAT'S how you learn to be a lawyer. But Gorringe don't have what I call a practice at all. He just sees men in the other room there, with the door shut, and whatever there is to do he does it all himself.”
The minister remembered a stray hint somewhere that Mr. Gorringe was a money-lender—what was colloquially called a “note-shaver.” To his rustic sense, there was something not quite nice about that occupation. It would be indecorous, he felt, to encourage further talk about it from the boy.
“What are you doing there?” he inquired, to change the subject.
“Sorting out some plants,” replied Harvey. “I don't know what's got into Gorringe lately. This is the third big box he's had since I've been here—that is, in six weeks—besides two baskets full of rose-bushes. I don't know what he does with them. He carries them off himself somewhere. I've had kind of half a notion that he's figurin' on getting married. I can't think of anything else that would make a man spend money like water—just for flowers and bushes. They do get foolish, you know, when they've got marriage on the brain.”
Theron found himself only imperfectly following the theories of the young philosopher. It was his fact that monopolized the minister's attention.
“But as I understand it,” he remarked hesitatingly, “Brother Gorringe—or rather Mr. Gorringe—gets all the plants he wants, everything he likes, from a big garden somewhere outside. I don't know that it is exactly his; but I remember hearing something to that effect.”
The boy slapped the last litter off his hands, and, as he came to the window, shook his head. “These don't come from no garden outside,” he declared. “They come from the dealers', and he pays solid cash for 'em. The invoice for this lot alone was thirty-one dollars and sixty cents. There it is on the table. You can see it for yourself.”
Mr. Ware did not offer to look. “Very likely these are for the garden I was speaking of,” he said. “Of course you can't go on taking plants out of a garden indefinitely without putting others in.”
“I don't know anything about any garden that he takes plants out of,” answered Harvey, and looked meditatively for a minute or two out upon the street below. Then he turned to the minister. “Your wife's doing a good deal of gardening this spring, I notice,” he said casually. “You'd hardly think it was the same place, she's fixed it up so. If she wants any extra hoeing done, I can always get off Saturday afternoons.”
“I will remember,” said Theron. He also looked out of the window; and nothing more was said until, a few moments later, Mr. Gorringe himself came in.