"Gee!" says I. "Say, Merry, who belongs to all this?"
"Oh! Hadn't I told you?" says he. "You see, I live with my aunt. She is—er—somewhat peculiar; but——"
"I should worry!" I breaks in. "Believe me, with a joint like this in her own name, I wouldn't kick if she had her loft full of hummin' birds. Who's next in line for it?"
"Why, I suppose I am," says J. Meredith, "under certain conditions."
"Z-z-zin'!" says I. "And you hangin' onto a cheap skate job at the Corrugated!"
Well, while he's showin' me around the grounds I pumps out the rest of the sketch. Seems butlers and all that was no new thing to Merry. He'd been brought up on 'em. He'd lived abroad too. Studied music there. Not that he ever meant to work at it, but just because he liked it. You see, about that time the fam'ly income was rollin' in reg'lar every month from the mills back in Pawtucket, or Fall River, or somewhere.
Then all of a sudden things begin to happen,—strikes, panics, stock grabbin' by the trusts. Father's weak heart couldn't stand the strain. Meredith's mother followed soon after. And one rainy mornin' he wakes up in Baden Baden, or Monte Carlo, or wherever it was, to find that he's a double orphan at the age of twenty-two, with no home, no cash, and no trade. All he could do was to write an S. O. S. message back to Aunt Emma Jane. If she hadn't produced, he'd been there yet.
But Aunty got him out of pawn. Panics and so on hadn't cleaned out her share of the Stidler estate—not so you'd notice it! She'd been on the spot, Aunt Emma had, watchin' the market. Long before the jinx hit Wall Street she'd cashed in her mill stock for gold ballast, and when property prices started tumblin' she dug up a lard pail from under the syringa bush and begun investin' in bargain counter real estate. Now she owns business blocks, villa plots, and shore frontage in big chunks, and spends her time collectin' rents, makin' new deals, and swearin' off her taxes.
You'd most thought, with a perfectly good nephew to blow in some of her surplus on, she'd made a fam'ly pet of J. Meredith. But not her. Pets wasn't in her line. Her prescription for him was work, something reg'lar and constant, so he wouldn't get into mischief. She didn't care what it brought in, so long as he kept himself in clothes and spendin' money. And that was about Merry's measure. He could add up a column of figures and put the sum down neat at the bottom of the page. So he fitted into our audit department like a nickel into a slot machine. And there he stuck.
"But after sportin' around Europe so long," says I, "don't punchin' the time clock come kind of tough?"