"You're beginning to get your hooks in for the last word rather early, aren't you?"
"Tommy Watson! make no mistake about me. I'm going to have the first and last word now and—and——"
"To the end of your married life, I suppose," broke in Tommy with a sigh so heavy that it shook him.
Flo tapped him on the head with the fingers of one dainty hand. "You're almost intelligent at times, Tommy Watson," she said, with mock seriousness.
"Yes," he retorted, "yes; almost intelligent enough to go on the stage," and then he spent the next ten minutes in explaining that he had meant to convey no reflections; that his sweetheart was the dearest, most lovable, and most intelligent person in the world; that he would never have made, and never could make, an actor: that he was the biggest bonehead in the boundaries of the City of Toronto, and all his friends and acquaintances knew it. She made him withdraw the last assertion, and beg her pardon in his nicest manner for insulting himself and his wife to be, and then came back to the subject of William.
"There's promise in the boy," she said, "he'll be a great comedian some day, if he gets a fair start."
"Yes, and he knows it, too," Tommy commented, "confound the kid. Sometimes he drives me frantic, but all the time I like him. He hasn't got the faintest notion of ever being anything but a comedian. He's almost uncanny. What he doesn't think of hasn't been thought of by anybody yet, I'll bet. He can't find words, often, to tell what his thoughts are, and then he falls back on the greatest line of slang I've ever heard. Only yesterday he said to 'Chuck' Epstein, 'Many's the time when things all go wrong I've felt like going home and crying, honest. Then, when I'd get home, there's Pa dead tired, but chirpin' like a cricket, and Ma tired too, but hustlin' around gettin' supper for Pa and the kids and me, and Dolly and Pete and the others all waitin' to see what line I'm going to take. So I gets busy and cuts up, and, say, maybe we don't have the merry ha ha times, and my Pa says to me often, he says, "William, make 'em laugh; a feller what can hide the sores in his own heart," he says, "while he's makin' somebody else laugh," he says, "he's a winner more ways than one." And it's true, Mister Epstein.'"
"Yes," said Flo, softly, "it's true."
"But now, here's the situation," Tommy went on. "William's Pa is doing pretty well now, and he won't stand for any charity game. If the boy will go back to school, Pa Turnpike will cheerfully consent, but William won't. He's very stubborn on that point. 'Not for mine,' he says. 'If I could stick to history and reading lessons, all right, but the rest of the truck they try to shovel into a boy's head at school kills me dead. Say, I've come outer the school some days almost scared to put me feet down for fear they'd slip over the edge of the world, and I never really know whether the sun goes around the world or the world around the sun, and often I ain't been sure whether the sun might hit us, or us hit the sun, and everything bust to pieces.'"
"Well, you'll have to try persuasion on him."