“Oh daddy do hurry up an save a lot of money. Alice Vaughan’s mother an father go to the White Mountains every summer, but next summer they’re going abroad.”
Ed Thatcher looked out across the bay that stretched in blue sparkling reaches into the brown haze towards the Narrows. The statue of Liberty stood up vague as a sleepwalker among the curling smoke of tugboats and the masts of schooners and the blunt lumbering masses of brickbarges and sandscows. Here and there the glary sun shone out white on a sail or on the superstructure of a steamer. Red ferryboats shuttled back and forth.
“Daddy why arent we rich?”
“There are lots of people poorer than us Ellie.... You wouldn’t like your daddy any better if he were rich would you?”
“Oh yes I would daddy.”
Thatcher laughed. “Well it might happen someday.... How would you like the firm of Edward C. Thatcher and Co., Certified Accountants?”
Ellen jumped to her feet: “Oh look at that big boat.... That’s the boat I want to go on.”
“That there’s the Harabic,” croaked a cockney voice beside them.
“Oh is it really?” said Thatcher.
“Indeed it is, sir; as fahne a ship as syles the sea sir,” explained eagerly a frayed creakyvoiced man who sat on the bench beside them. A cap with a broken patentleather visor was pulled down over a little peaked face that exuded a faded smell of whiskey. “Yes sir, the Harabic sir.”