r boy is deteriorating? Don't you suppose I know what YOU
have to go through, Alice? And when I think of that man upstairs----"
The agitated voice grew louder. "When I think of him and know that
nothing in the world but his STUBBORNNESS keeps my children from having
all they want and what they OUGHT to have, do you suppose I'm going to
hold myself bound to keep to the absolute letter of a silly promise he
got from me by behaving like a crazy man? I can't! I can't do it! No
mother could sit by and see him lock up a horn of plenty like that in
his closet when the children were starving!"

"Oh, goodness, goodness me!" Alice protested. "We aren't precisely
'starving,' are we?"

Mrs. Adams began to weep. "It's just the same. Didn't I see how flushed
and pretty you looked, this afternoon, after you'd been walking with
this young man that's come here? Do you suppose he'd LOOK at a girl like
Mildred Palmer if you had what you ought to have? Do you suppose he'd be
going into business with her father if YOUR father----"

"Good heavens, mama; you're worse than Walter: I just barely know the
man! DON'T be so absurd!"

"Yes, I'm always 'absurd,'" Mrs. Adams moaned. "All I can do is cry,
while your father sits upstairs, and his horn of plenty----"

But Alice interrupted with a peal of desperate laughter. "Oh, that
'horn of plenty!' Do come down to earth, mama. How can you call a GLUE
factory, that doesn't exist except in your mind, a 'horn of plenty'? Do
let's be a little rational!"

"It COULD be a horn of plenty," the tearful Mrs. Adams insisted. "It
could! You don't understand a thing about it."

"Well, I'm willing," Alice said, with tired skepticism. "Make me
understand, then. Where'd you ever get the idea?"

Mrs. Adams withdrew her hands from the water, dried them on a towel,
and then wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. "Your father could make a
fortune if he wanted to," she said, quietly. "At least, I don't say a
fortune, but anyhow a great deal more than he does make."

"Yes, I've heard that before, mama, and you think he could make it out
of a glue factory. What I'm asking is: How?"

"How? Why, by making glue and selling it. Don't you know how bad most
glue is when you try to mend anything? A good glue is one of the rarest
things there is; and it would just sell itself, once it got started.
Well, your father knows how to make as good a glue as there is in the
world."

Alice was not interested. "What of it? I suppo