Inside, Sunny was telling her father her story. "Begin from the first," he had said. "Omit nothing. I must know everything about you."
Graphically, as they waited for the lunch, she sketched in all the sordid details of her early life, the days of their mendicancy making the man feel immeasurably mean. Sitting at the desk now, his eyes shaded with his hand, he gritted his teeth, and struck the table with repeated soundless blows when his daughter told him of Hirata. But something, a feeling more penetrating than pain, stung Stephen Wainwright when she told him of those warmhearted men who had come into her life like a miracle and taken the place that he should have been there to fill. For the first time he interrupted her to take down the names of her friends, one by one, on a pad of paper. Professor Barrowes, Zoologist and Professor of Archeology. Wainwright had heard of him somewhere recently. Yes, he recalled him now. Some dispute about a recent "find" of the Professor's. A question raised as to the authenticity of the fossil. Opposition to its being placed in the Museum—Newspaper discussion. An effort on the Professor's part to raise funds for further exploration in Canada northwest.
Robert Mapson, Jr. Senator Wainwright knew the reporter slightly. He had covered stories in which Senator Wainwright was interested. On the Comet. Sunny's father knew the Comet people well.
Lamont Potter, Jr. Philadelphia people. His firm did business with them. Young Potter at Bellevue.
J. Lyon Crawford, son of a man once at college with Wainwright. Sunny's father recalled some chaffing joke at the club anent "Jinx's" political ambitions. As a prospect in politics he had seemed a joke to his friends.
And, last, J. Addison Hammond, Jr., "Jerry."
How Sunny had pronounced that name! There was that about that soft inflection that caused her father to hold his pencil suspended, while a stab of jealousy struck him.
"What does he do, Sunny?"
"Ho! He are goin' be grade artist-arki-tuck. He make so beautiful pictures, and he have mos' beautiful thought on inside his head. He goin' to make all these city loog beautiful. He show how make 'partment houses, where all god light and there's garden grow on top, and there's house where they not put out liddle bebby on street. He's go sleep and play on those garden on top house."