During the latter part of the Christmas recess, Thorndyke went north to pay his sister, Elizabeth, a visit. Her first words to him were:
“Why, Geoffrey, how young you look!”
And everybody who met him told him he looked young, or looked well, or looked prosperous, and one horny-handed old constituent hazarded the opinion that Mr. Thorndyke was “thinkin’ o’ gittin’ spliced.” It was all because Constance Maitland had been kind to him.
On his way back to Washington he found himself in the same car with James Brentwood Baldwin, Junior, who was coming home to be nursed and taken to Palm Beach after an attack of the chicken-pox. This fifteen-year-old youth was in charge of a valet who attended to him assiduously, and even went into the dining-car with him to see that he exercised due prudence with regard to his diet. This, however, was superfluous, as the scion of the house of Baldwin was the very epitome of prudence, and turned away from entrées, sweets, and ices with a degree of virtue which, to Thorndyke, dining at the same table with him, seemed superhuman in a boy of any age. Thorndyke watched the Baldwin boy curiously; it was one of the most deadly and fascinating phases of the whole newly-rich question to him, how the children of the newly rich were brought up. He observed in the Baldwin boy a total lack of the normal faults and virtues of the normal boy. Young Baldwin eyed Thorndyke at first with suspicion, but Thorndyke, wishing to examine and classify the specimen of a boy before him, intimated that he was acquainted with the James Brentwood Baldwins in Washington. Then James, Junior, abandoned something of his hauteur. He acknowledged being the pupil of a school at which Thorndyke happened to know the fees were made purposely so high as to exclude any but the sons of the very rich. They had an Anglican nomenclature, a resident chaplain, and the spiritual direction of the masters as well as the pupils was attended to by the Bishop of the diocese—the brother of the Secretary of State. All this James, Junior, communicated while toying with his rice-pudding, and turning an eye of stern disapproval at the tutti-frutti ice.
“And what do you expect to be when you grow up, my lad?” asked Thorndyke.
“I shall be a philanthropist,” replied James, Junior, with dignity. “I shall try to use my wealth as a means of benefiting others. I am president of our association for giving Christmas gifts to poor boys, and I like it very much. We, who have superior advantages, should try and extend a helping hand to others less fortunately placed.”
Less fortunately placed! Thorndyke looked at the boy with the deepest commiseration, and pitied the poor children of the rich.
“You can learn a great deal from a poor boy,” said he, presently, watching the boy’s solemn, handsome face. He might have been a hearty, wholesome youngster, this grandson of Danny Hogan’s, had he but been given a chance. “The poor boy is the normal boy; a boy should be generally dirty and noisy; he should occasionally get a lecture from his mother and a licking from his father, and a black eye from some other boy. He must be a fighter. No less a man than Paul Jones has said that he never saw a liar who would fight, or a fighter who would lie; and he must not only tell the truth himself, but be ready to lick any other boy who tells him a lie, for boys are, to themselves, a law-making body, and must enforce their own laws.”
“That is not the way of the boys at our school,” icily replied James Brentwood Baldwin, Junior, rising with dignity and receiving his hat from the hand of his valet.
The day of Thorndyke’s arrival in Washington he was walking along the street in the bright, sunny, early afternoon of winter. He stopped to buy an afternoon newspaper, that he might see how the balloting for Senator was going in Crane’s State, when a shout aroused him, and Letty Standiford, in a gorgeous crimson automobile, with Senator Mince Pie Mulligan by her side, dashed up to the sidewalk.