"Idiotic is exactly the word," he said with a laugh, and the compliments he had paid her in a spirit of self-raillery awakened a little feeling of tenderness after his teasing had shown him that, according to her lights, she cared more than he had thought.
All the same when he rose to hurry downtown, he was under no illusions: if opportunity permitted him to fit into the social scheme of things, well and good; if not— His thoughts recurred to Fred DeLancy's words:
"There are three ways of making money: to have it left to you, to earn it, and to marry it."
He broke off angrily, troubled with doubts, and for the hundredth time he found himself asking:
"Now why the deuce can't I be mad in love with a girl who cares for me, who's a beauty and has everything in the world! What is it?"
For he had once been very much in love when he was a schoolboy and Doris had been just a schoolgirl, with open eyes and impulsive direct ways, like a certain young lady, with breathless, laughing lips who had come sliding into his life on the comical tail of a scampering terrier.
CHAPTER IV
BOJO'S FATHER
The offices of the Associated Woolen Mills were on the sixteenth floor of a modern office building in the lower city, which towered above the surrounding squalid brownstone houses given over to pedlers and delicatessen shops like a gleaming stork ankle deep in a pool of murky water.