"An old goose."
"No, a brute!"
This explosion appeared momentarily to relieve his state of mind. But in his breast there was still left a sufficiency of outraged dignity to warm his cheeks hotly, and not by any means without an abundance of cause. Scarcely an hour before he had nervously, yet exultantly, alighted from his big touring car in front of the Commercial Bank, to seek the president of that institution in the sanctity of his private office. There, briefly but eloquently, he announced the engagement of Miss Bettina Stokes to Mr. Paul Strumley, and naïvely requested for the happy young people a full share of the parental sanction and blessing. And his callow confidence can hardly be condemned on recalling that he was one of the wealthiest and most popular young swains in the city. Mr. Stokes, however, did not seem to take this into consideration. On the contrary, he rose to the occasion with an outburst of disapprobation too inflammatory to be set on paper, and quickly followed it with a picturesque and uncompromising ultimatum. In the confused distress of the unexpected Mr. Strumley found himself unable to marshal a single specimen of logical refutation. He could only retreat in haste, to recover, if possible, at leisure.
But this leisure, the time it had taken him to hurl the machine across town to Bettina, had proven sadly insufficient. When he rushed up the steps to the veranda, where sat the object of his affections rocking in beautiful serenity, he was still choking from indignation, and had found it hard to tell her in coherent sentences that her father had energetically refused the honor of an alliance with the highly respectable Strumley family.
The grounds, however, on which had been based this unreasonable objection were of all things under the sun the most preposterous. Mr. Stokes had emphatically declared that his daughter's happiness was too dear to him to be foolishly entrusted to one who could not even manage his own affairs, let alone the affairs of a wife, and, presumably later, of a family. Mr. Strumley was rich at present, so much was readily conceded; but he was not capable himself of taking care of what a thrifty parent had laid by for him. He in his weak-mindedness was compelled to hire the brains of a mere substitute, a manager, if you prefer. Should anything happen, and such things happen every day, where would Mr. Strumley be? And where, pray, would be his wife and family? In the poorhouse!
"My daughter is too good for a man who cannot manage his own concerns," the irate father had summed up. "When you have shown yourself capable, my lad, of competing in the world with grown-up intellects, then there will be time enough for you to contemplate matrimony—and not until then. Good morning to you, Mr. Strumley."
"And he snapped his jaws together like a vise," recalled Paul, coming out from his gloomy retrospection.
"If he shut them so," and Bettina worked her pretty chin out to its farthest extension, "well, that means he is like the man from Missouri; you've got to show him before he changes his mind one iota."
"I ought to have been humping over a desk from the start," regretted Mr. Strumley, feeling his bulging biceps dolefully. "It's all right stroking a crew, and heaps of fun, too, but it doesn't win you a wife. Now there's your dad, he couldn't pull a soap box across a bath tub; but he can pull through a 'deal' I couldn't budge with a hand-spike."
Miss Bettina sighed sympathetically, and smiled appreciatively. She felt deeply for her lover, and was justly proud of such a capable parent. "Every one does say papa is an excellent business man," she remarked; "and he certainly can swing some wonderful deals. Only yesterday I accidentally overheard him telling Mr. Proctor that he held an option—I think that was the word—from Haynes, Forster & Company on thousands and thousands of acres of timber land in Arkansas. He said it would expire to-day at two o'clock, but that he was going to buy the land for cash—'spot cash' he said was what they demanded."