"It set me to making a man of myself," he used to say.
Georgie did not see him for more than a year after his departure, but he wrote twice to say that he had taken her advice and it had "worked," and he had "got a rise." The truth was that the boy had an undeveloped capacity for affairs, inherited from the able old grandfather, who laid the foundations of the fortune which Bob's father muddled away. When once will and energy were roused and brought into play, this hereditary bent asserted itself. Bob became valuable to his employers, and like Georgie's "dust," began to go up in the business scale.
Georgie had just successfully re-established the Algernon Parishes, who arrived five months later than was expected, in their home, when Bob came up for a second visit to his uncle. This time he had three weeks' leave, and it was just before he went back that he proposed the formation of what he was pleased to call "A Labor Union."
"You see I'm a working man now just as you are a working woman," he explained. "It's our plain duty to co-operate. You shall be Grand Master—or rather Mistress—and I'll be some sort of a subordinate,—a Walking Delegate, perhaps."
"Indeed, you shall be nothing of the sort. Walking Delegates are particularly idle people, I've always heard. They just go about ordering other folks to stop work and do nothing."
"Then I won't be one. I'll be Grand Master's Mate."
"There's no such office in Labor Unions. If we have one at all, you must have the first place in it."
"What is that position? Please describe it in full. Whatever happens, I won't strike."
"Oh," said Georgie, with the prettiest blush in the world, "the position is too intricate for explanation; we won't describe it."
"But will you join the Union?"