“Father,” said she that night, “let’s have a little Christmas party.”
“All right,” said the colonel. “Whom shall we invite?”
“Don’t laugh,” said she. “I want to invite Jim Irwin and his mother, and nobody else.”
“All right,” reiterated the colonel. “But why?”
“Oh,” said Jennie, “I want to see whether I can talk Jim out of some of his foolishness.”
“You want to line him up, do you?” said the colonel. “Well, that’s good politics, and incidentally, you may get some good ideas out of Jim.”
“Rather unlikely,” said Jennie.
“I don’t know about that,” said the colonel, smiling. “I begin to think that Jim’s a Brown Mouse. I’ve told you about the Brown Mouse, haven’t I?”
“Yes,” said Jennie. “You’ve told me. But Professor Darbishire’s brown mice were simply wild and incorrigible creatures. Just because it happens to emerge suddenly from the forests of heredity, it doesn’t prove that the Brown Mouse is any good.”
“Justin Morgan was a Brown Mouse,” said the colonel. “And he founded the greatest breed of horses in the world.”