"I know _how_ to handle trunks, I do,"
and it certainly seemed that he did, for he swung it to his back
with all the grace of a Sandow, and started off with it. Mr. Fenelby
looked at him with surprise.
"Now, isn't that one of the oddities of nature?" said Mr. Fenelby.
"That fellow looks as if he had no strength at all, and see how he
carries off that trunk as if there was not a thing in it. I suppose
it is a knack he has. Now, see how hard it is for me merely to lift
one end of this smallest one."
But before he could touch it Kitty had grasped him by the arm.
"Oh, don't try it!" she cried. "Please don't! You might hurt your
back."
IV
BILLY
A few minutes before noon the next day Billy Fenelby dropped into
Mr. Fenelby's office in the city and the two men went out to lunch
together. It would be hard to imagine two brothers more unlike than
Thomas and William Fenelby, for if Thomas Fenelby was inclined to be
small in stature and precise in his manner, William was all that his
nickname of Billy implied, and was not so many years out of his
college foot-ball eleven, where he had won a place because of his
size and strength. Billy Fenelby, after having been heroized by
innumerable girls during his college years, had become definitely a
man's man, and was in the habit of saying that his girly-girl days
were over, and that he would walk around a block any day to escape
meeting a girl. He was not afraid of girls, and he did not hate
them, but he simply held that they were not worth while. The truth
was that he had been so petted and worshiped by them as a star
foot-ball player that the attention they paid him, as an ordinary
young man not unlike many other young men out of college, seemed
tame by comparison. No doubt he had come to believe, during his
college days, that the only interesting thing a girl could do was to
admire a man heartily, and in the manner that only foot-ball players
and matinee idols are admired, so that now, when he had no
particular claim to admiration, girls had become, so far as he was
concerned, useless affairs.
"Now, about this girl-person that you have over at your house," he
said to his brother, when they were seated at their lunch, "what
about her?"
"About her?" asked Mr. Fenelby. "How do you mean?"
"What about her?" repeated Billy. "You know how I feel about the
girl-business. I suppose she is going to stay awhile?"
"Kitty? I think so. We want her to. But you needn'
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