Now ever since Daughter was a baby blowing bubbles out of the corners of her mouth, Papa had lived in Mortal Dread of a day when she might buckle up with a man who would be only after his Thirty Dollars which he had slowly and painfully piled up through pluck, perseverance and pre-natal pull. And so when he saw her temperature rising and her appetite falling, he dug out her secret and then started on a quiet hunt to find out whether the daring Disturber was Grade A, or tinnif.
As he had feared, the Rat proved to be a Baltimore Luncher pulling down Fifteen Dollars per week and washing his own clothes in the bath tub.
This discovery caused a Family Upheaval which for pep, polish and all-round proficiency had all Mexican Mixups looking like a harmless after-school scamper at Hop Scotch.
Every evening at sundown when Father would come home from the din and roar of his quarter-acre Plant, the neighbors would gather at their windows for the latest war news. Sometimes the Carranzaists would be on top; at other times the Villaists and Zapaists would have it.
Daughter protested hotly during these Bloody Encounters that her king was Poor but Honest, but father had him sized up as a Single Cylinder.
One night when the walls were being freshly inlaid with flying furniture and bric-a-brac, Daughter ducked out of the peaceful abode and down to the Railway Station and caught the Milk Train for New York. The following Wednesday at 4 P. M., Kendallville Time, she took Philip Darlington Wakefield for Better or Worse and wired Father for his blessing and $100 to come back home on.
At first Father was all for raising his hand to High Heaven and pronouncing the Irish Cottage Curse with all the spine-chilling heroics about darkening the Threshold, but Mother looked quietly over her goggles and told him to cut the cheap melodramatic stuff and behave like a white man, and tell the Young Folks to buy a couple of postcards of the Woolworth Building and come back home.
Under this stinging philippic Father melted into the big armchair and became human, and a couple of days later the Bride and Groom blew into Squirrel Cove and turned all Main Street into little groups of excited goatees.
Philip Darlington gave Father the first Hoyo he had ever smoked and took the old gazunk completely off his underpinning by showing a knowledge of Industry and Finance that only a Fifteen Dollar New York clerk can possess. On the strength of it he landed a job in Father’s mighty Works and wasn’t there a week before every yunk in the place was plotting for his destruction.
The reason, tersely and succinctly expressed, was that Phil proved to have Ideas and nobody around the Works cared to deliberately expose himself to the danger of infection. But Phil went right ahead and shifted men and things here, there and everywhere, and put in Time Clocks and Cost Systems and all kinds of efficiency effects.