"Do?" says Old Hickory. "Tell him to send for a glazier."
CHAPTER XVII
NO LUCK WITH AUNTIE
Well, I expect I've gone and done it again. Queered myself with Auntie. Vee's, of course. You'd most think I'd know how to handle the old girl by this time, for we've been rubbin' elbows, as you might say, for quite a few years now. But somehow we seldom hit it off just right.
Not that I don't try. Say, one of the big ambitions of my young life has been to do something that would please Auntie so much that no matter what breaks I made later on she'd be bound to remember it. Up to date, though, I haven't pulled anything of the kind. No. In fact, just the reverse.
I've often wished there was some bureau I could go to and get the correct dope on managin' an in-law aunt with a hair-trigger disposition. Like the Department of Agriculture. You know if it was boll-weevils, or cattle tick, or black rust, all I'd have to do would be to drop a postcard to Washington and in a month or so I'd have all kinds of pamphlets, with colored plates and diagrams, tellin' me just what to do. But balky aunts on your wife's side seem to have been overlooked.
Somebody ought to write a book on the subject. You can get 'em that will tell you how to play bridge, or golf, or read palms, or raise chickens, or bring up babies. But nothin' on aunts who give you the cold eye and work up suspicions. And it's more or less important, 'specially if they're will-makin' aunts, with something to make wills about.
Not that I'm any legacy hound. She can do what she wants with her money, for all of me. Course, there's Vee to be considered. I wouldn't want to think, when the time comes, if it ever does, that her Auntie is with us no more, that it was on account of something I'd said or done that the Society for the Suppression of Jazz Orchestras was handed an unexpected bale of securities instead of the same being put where Vee could cash in on the coupons. Also there's Master Richard Hemmingway. I want to be able to look sonny in the face, years from now, without having to explain that if I'd been a little more diplomatic towards his mother's female relations he might he startin' for college on an income of his own instead of havin' to depend on my financin' his football career.