“Oh ... not to-morrow, please!” The guest was deprecatory. “I couldn’t stall Eugenia off with one day, you know!”
“Eugenia?”
“My female parent—Madame President, of the Federated Clubs. Surely you’ve heard of Eugenia? An excellent person in her way—” he turned gravely to his shocked host, “and I feel for her an esteem bordering upon affection, but she has the fatal defect of superseriousness. Some one from here very thoughtfully mailed me a marked copy of a jolly little paper called The Torch and——”
“The Torch?” Old Mr. Carey laid down his knife and fork and the choleric flush flooded his convalescent pallor. “Confound them, sir, the greasy——”
“Dad, dear,” Nancy warned him softly, “you’re not to get excited!”
“Miserable, beetle-browed, chicken-livered scum of the earth! Wish to the Lord we didn’t need ’em so desperately! I wouldn’t have a one on the premises! They’re always holding their meetings in dark alleys and plotting and planning, and upsetting the hands. And they dared to send you— Was it the one with a scurrilous article on yourself, my boy?”
Peter nodded. “The very same little valentine!”
“Cousin ’Gene,” Bob Lee Tenafee’s widow wanted to know, very seriously, “are you going to let a thing like that go unpunished? I think it’s abominable.”
The old gentleman brought his good fist down on the table with a resounding thump. “No, Mary-Lou, no, by the eternal! I’m going to run that rascal down if I have to get a detective from New York! I’ll show ’em that they can’t act like Russia in America! I’ll——”
“Oh, please,” said his young partner winningly, “don’t cheat me out of the fun of doing that for myself!”