"Were you so ungallant as that?" Thatcher asked. "Whatever else happens, Phil, we must stand up for the family."

"Of course," he admitted; "but Billy was talking about Merry in superlatives as usual, and I was trying to quiet him down."

"Phil is doing his best to put me in wrong again," Billy protested. "Now I'll tell you just what happened and you can judge for yourselves: I was telling Uncle Monty how happy I was to be invited here for Easter, and how glad I should be to see you all--"

"You never said a word about any one but Merry," Philip interrupted.

Billy looked vindictively at his friend and then smiled sheepishly.

"I meant all of you, of course. Then Phil tried to jolly me about caring for girls and for Merry in particular--"

"Don't be foolish, Billy!" Merry exclaimed.

"My! but it's hard to tell a story here, but I'm going to do it if I burst a blood-vessel! Uncle Monty agreed with me, and then said that Merry was the finest girl he ever saw. That from him is some praise, because he never cuts in on girls at all; but you've made a hit with him, Merry, and you might as well know it."

"I'm glad he hasn't forgotten me," she said quietly, but the color remained in her face after the conversation turned upon other topics.

"What I said a moment ago isn't 'knocking,' as you call it, Billy," Mrs.

Thatcher resumed; "it is experience. We older folk know from what we've seen, and from what we've been through, the dangers young people run during the inflammable age; so we sound the warning. You are at that age now, Billy, so your friends are trying to protect you. Philip apparently hasn't arrived there yet, but he will; and then we'll try to protect him from the idea that the 'only girl' is the one he happens to fancy while the period lasts."

"You're making me look like a flivver!" the boy said with mortification in his voice; "and before Merry, too!"

"No, my dear; you mustn't take it that way. I'm talking no more freely than you have been. We consider you one of the family, so I'm speaking to you just as I would to Philip."

Billy's face was fiery red, but he never flinched in his dogged determination.

"I don't care who knows how much I think of Merry," he said defiantly.

"You've spoiled my visit! I'm not a bit ashamed--"

"Forgive me, Billy," she soothed him gently,--"of course you're not ashamed. I wouldn't speak to you like this if you weren't one of my own boys; but I do want you to realize that it is seldom that early fancies are more than impersonal idealizations. I'm glad you and Merry like each other, and I hope you will always be the best of friends; but, in applying our idealization to the one who at the moment comes nearest to the realization, a mistake is usually made because the one we are really looking for hasn't yet crossed our horizon."

"Sometimes, perhaps," Billy conceded; "but there are exceptions."

Mrs. Thatcher smiled at his persistency. She liked the boy, and had seized on this opportunity to spare him the greater disappointment which she felt sure would come.

"Yes," she answered kindly; "there are exceptions. I know of one in my own experience, but in this case it only made it more unfortunate. I knew a boy once who applied the idealization formed during the inflammable period to a girl who at that time thought she cared for him.

Then her horizon broadened and she found and married the man she really loved; but the boy held on to his early ideal, becoming a recluse, embittered against the world and incapable of seeing that unless the ideal becomes a reality to both it can never safely amount to anything."

Thatcher looked at his wife questioningly, and Merry's eyes also fastened themselves upon her mother's face. Marian's voice as much as her words disclosed more than she intended. As she paused Philip, supposing the conversation to be concluded, mentioned the name which was in each one's mind except the boys'.

"By the way, Mother," he remarked, "Mr. Huntington wants me to meet a friend of his named Hamlen, who, he says, used to be a friend of yours."

"Yes," she said, looking up at him quickly,--"yes; I, too, wish you to meet Mr. Hamlen. He is in New York now. Perhaps you will see him before you return. I want you to know him well."

As Thatcher a.s.sisted them in getting off to the theater, he managed to draw Marian one side.

"Hamlen's name is Philip, isn't it?" he asked.

She nodded, wondering at the question.

"Was that why you gave our boy the same name--and was it Hamlen you referred to just now?"

"Yes, Harry."

He drew her gently to him and kissed her. "Poor chap!" he said. "If I had known that I would have made a greater effort to be friendly with him."

XXVI

During these depressed months Thatcher was not the only man of affairs who saw the successes of his career threatened with disaster as a result of the unnecessary burdens imposed by inexperienced and impractical officials at Washington. Business groaned aloud as destructive control and regulation delayed and paralyzed commerce. Labor, hand in hand with its new ally Theory, stalked abroad through the land, demanding shorter hours and increased wages, receiving recognition as a privileged cla.s.s from those in authority, exempt from respecting others' rights, which is necessary to create and preserve responsibility: substance when it struck at Capital, shadow when Capital in self-defense struck back. The corporations which formed the pulse of the country's life were so hara.s.sed that they paused in their constructive energies, wondering what new menace would rise up before them, and yet were expected to give better service while bound hand and foot by unwise legislative restrictions, and burdened by unnecessary legislative demands for increased expenditure. Samson, shorn of his strength by the shears of a legalized Delilah, was expected to hold up with his enervated arms the pillars of the temple which "psychological" complacency was pulling down.

The first serious rumors reached Thatcher in Bermuda, and when he returned to his office his far-sighted perception told him that the business world was face to face with a real crisis. Many of his enterprises were in a condition where to pause in aggressive action meant going backwards, entailing loss upon all concerned; yet to proceed in the face of conditions as they were was to invite disaster and even to imperil the stability of his firm.

Cosden had felt the result of the depression in decreased business, but he did not realize as soon as Thatcher the far-reaching results inevitable from the new governmental policy. His horizon was local compared to that of the New York operator, and he regarded the conditions as a phase of business life, bound to appear once in so often, rather than a blow at the basis upon which the commercial world rested. He cut down his expenses in proportion to his reduced volume of business, strengthened his relations at his banks, and considered his sails trimmed to weather any storm.

Thatcher had invited him to call, and Cosden had no idea other than to make the most of the intimacy which had developed in Bermuda. More than that, the machinery matter they had touched upon had progressed even better than he expected. If Thatcher was still curious to learn more about the details the time had now come when he could safely be told.

But to Cosden's surprise the subject was not once directly referred to during their interview. Thatcher was cordial and affable, seemingly interested in the general conversation and frank in his discussion of various topics which presented themselves, but, as it appeared to Cosden, strangely reticent upon certain specific subjects on which he would have been glad to draw him out. It was only when Cosden paused for a moment at the door of the private office that Thatcher made any remark which gave his visitor an insight as to what was in his mind.

"The full meaning of these present conditions evidently has not struck Boston yet," he said. "Let me tell you that these are times when the wise man learns how to wait. Instead of blaming your customers who hesitate to give you the usual orders you should scrupulously investigate the credit of those who do."

"I can wait," Cosden said confidently. "I've always held myself back from spreading out too thin, and if there's a storm coming on top of this sloppy weather I'm fixed where I can meet it better perhaps than some others."

"You are to be congratulated," Thatcher told him with so much feeling that Cosden took it as a personal compliment and departed well satisfied with his interview.

When he next met Huntington in Boston they discussed this among other topics, and Cosden was surprised to have his friend ask him point-blank whether he had heard rumors regarding Thatcher's firm.

"You're dreaming, Monty," he replied with conviction. "Thatcher is a man who makes money whichever way the market turns. That's what I admire so much in him. I only win out when things go one way, but he wins coming and going. What in the world put that idea in your head?"

The chance remark which Billy had made regarding the reduction in Philip's allowance was too much in the nature of a confidence to be repeated, but it had left Huntington with a definite impression that Thatcher must be feeling the conditions acutely or he would not have begun to curtail expenses at home. To a man who lived as Thatcher did, Huntington knew that this would be the hardest duty he would find to perform. Cosden's question was answered lightly.

"Wall Street is being hit hard," he said. "I am hoping that so good a fellow as Thatcher won't be caught in the reaction."

"Don't worry about that," Cosden laughed. "You'll find when the sky clears that he has looked far enough ahead to make even the storm pay him tribute."

"Hamlen arrives to-morrow," Huntington remarked, changing the subject lest his question raise some doubts in Cosden's mind which might linger.

"I shall give myself up to him a good deal while he is here, so you mustn't be surprised if you don't see as much of me as usual. He needs me more than you do."

"That may be," Cosden admitted, "but how about you? I have an idea that, with the peculiar state of mind you've been in lately, you will forget your overpowering sense of age better with me than you will with him."

"Perhaps," Huntington admitted, smiling; "but I must think of him first."