“You haven’t argued any more than I have. But I guess she’s got an idea back of it all. She wants to feel that it’s she who looks after the kids.”
A dull flush crept up into Dick’s cheeks.
“She looks after them, anyway, no matter whether I pay a bill here and there or not, doesn’t she? And it puts me in a rotten position.”
Mr. Warner laid a comradely arm over Dick’s shoulders.
“You are in a rotten position,” he agreed, “and you got yourself into it—wanting to have everything in the world. Cecily is worth sacrificing some things for, my boy.”
“It wasn’t that I wasn’t willing to give up anything,” Dick shrugged away. “What’s the use of going over it? The thing’s threadbare.”
“How are things with you now, Dick?”
“Hell to pay on the ranges. Matthew wants me to spend part of the winter there and I think I may. It was well enough to keep your hand on from here in the old days, but things are different now. It’s going to take brains to handle that yapping crowd of Slovaks up there.”
“How can you handle it on the ground?”
“Watch things. Let them know you’re there. Be a bit more friendly. They like the idea of the city men being on the ground, you know. And I could keep an eye on some of these raw superintendents. There’s a good deal of mishandling, you know.”