y punched away at each other with soft gloves
as determinedly and as energetically as if they were deadly enemies,
and then Bobby went back up to his own office. He found Applerod
jubilant and Johnson glum. Already Applerod heard himself saying to
his old neighbors: "As Frank L. Sharpe said to me this morning--," or:
"I told Sharpe--," or: "Say! Sam Stone stopped at my desk
yesterday--," and already he began to shine by this reflected glory.

"I hear that you have decided to go into the Brightlight Electric," he
observed.

"Signed all the papers this morning," admitted Bobby.

"Allow me to congratulate you, sir," said Applerod, but Johnson
silently produced from an index case a plain, gray envelope, which he
handed to Bobby.

It was inscribed:

_To My Son Upon His Putting Good Money Into any
Public Service Corporation_

and it read:

"When the manipulators of public service corporations tire of
skinning the dear public in bulk, they skin individual
specimens just to keep in practice. If you have been fool
enough to get into the crowd that invokes the aid of dirty
politics to help it hang people on street-car straps, just
write them out a check for whatever money you have left, and
tell your trustee you are broke again; because you are not and
never can be of their stripe, and if you are not of their
stripe they will pick your bones. Turn a canary loose in a
colony of street sparrows and watch what happens to it."

Bobby folded up the letter grimly and went into his private room,
where he thought long and soberly. That evening he went out to
Sharpe's to dinner. As he was about to ring the bell, he stopped,
confronted by a most unusual spectacle. Through the long plate-glass
of the door he could see clearly back through the hall into the
library, and there stood Mrs. Sharpe and William Garland in a tableau
"that would have given Plato the pip," as Biff Bates might have
expressed it had he known about Plato. At that moment Sharpe came
silently down the stairs and turned, unobserved, toward the library.
Seeing that his wife and Garland were so pleasantly engaged, he very
considerately turned into the drawing-room instead, _and as he entered
the drawing-room he lit a cigarette_! Bobby, vowing angrily that there
could never be room in the Brightlight for both Sharpe and himself,
did not ring the bell. Instead, he dropped in at the first public
telephone and 'phoned