“Isabella and her Octavius have reared their child to have the tastes of a common mechanic. It is too ridiculous. Richard needs to understand problems of finance, not of cogs and axle-grease. If only American parents would adopt the German methods! They teach their children what is best for them to know. They don’t permit their young people to waste time and money on wild-goose flights.”
“N-no.” I shivered a little. For some reason, the annual percentage of school-boy suicides in Prussia flashed through my mind. When you multiplied that by a nation— “But perhaps it’s as well that we give our boys more rope.”
“To hang themselves with?” sniffed Aunt Charlotte. I subsided.
So did Buster, for some weeks—weeks so peaceful, they were all but sinister. Across the ocean, a harebrained student murdered a reigning duke and his duchess. It made the newspapers very unpleasant reading for several days. Across the harbor, the yacht-club gave the most charming dinner dance of the year. Down East Gloucester way, a lank and close-mouthed youth from Salem had set up a shack of a hangar and was giving brief and gaspy flights to the summer populace at five dollars a head. Whereat Buster gravitated to East Gloucester, as the needle to the pole. He bribed Louisiana to give him his breakfast at seven; he snatched a mouthful of lunch in the village; he seldom reached home before dusk.
“Richard, you are not spending your allowance in aeroplane rides?”
“Say, listen, Cousin Edie. Where’d I get the coin for five-dollar jitney trips? I’m overdrawn sixty dollars on my allowance now, all on account of that beanery down the harbor—”
“The beanery? You haven’t eaten sixty dollars’ worth of beans!”
Buster jumped. He turned a sheepish red.
“Gosh, I forgot. Why—well, you see, the boss at that joint has just put in the grandest big new oven ever—iron and cement and a steam-chamber and everything. One day last week he had to go to Boston, and I asked him to let me fire it for him. It was the most interesting thing, to watch that steam-gauge hop up, only she hopped too fast. So I shut off the drafts, but I wasn’t quick enough. There were forty-eight pounds of beans in the roaster, and they burnt up, crocks and all, and—well, between us, we hadn’t put enough water in the boiler. So she sort of—er—well, she blew up. I wired dad for the money, and he came across by return mail. Dad’s a pretty good sport. But I’ll bet he doesn’t loosen up again before Labor Day.”
Well, I was sorry for the baker. But Buster, penniless, was far less formidable than Buster with money in his purse.