.

"Why, what have you got to say about the Hands?" Defiance underlay
tone and look.

"It was in this very room I promised you I'd keep my hands off the
Hands," Peter quoted. "But I want you to let me take the promise
back."

"I'll do nothing of the sort!" shrilled Peter senior. "What do you
mean?"

"I need to work. I've tried other things, but my thoughts always come
back to the Hands. I'm proud of your success you know. I want to--to
batten on it. And I want to carry it on. I have ideas of my own."

"I bet you have, and damned poor ideas, too," snapped the old man.
"I'm not going to have them tried in my place while I'm alive."

"Let me tell you what some of them are, won't you, before you condemn
them?" his son pleaded, refusing to be ruffled.

"No. I won't have my time wasted on any such childishness," growled
Peter senior. "You ought to know better than to trouble me with every
silly, trifling idea you get into your head."

"To me this is not trifling," Peter argued. "It's so serious that if
you refuse to take me into your business--I don't care how humble a
position you start me--I shall begin to make my own way in the world.
I can't go on as I am, living on you, with an allowance that comes out
of the Hands, unless you give me some hope that I can soon work up to
having a voice in the management."

"I suppose what you are really hinting at is a bigger allowance under
a different name," sneered old Peter. "Now you're turning
socialist--oh, you don't suppose I'm blind when I come to your name
and your quixotic schemes in the newspapers! You don't like the
red-hot chaps raving about 'unearned increment,' or whatever they call
it."

"No, it isn't that," Peter said simply. "I don't much care what people
say, so long as I can help things along a bit; though, of course, I'd
rather it would be with my money than yours, no matter how generous
you are about giving and asking no questions. I don't ask for more, or
want it. But I do want to feel that--forgive me, Father!--I do want to
feel that on the money I handle there's no sweat wrung out of men's
bodies or tears from women's eyes."

Peter senior had sat only half turned from his desk, as if suggesting
to Peter junior that the sooner he was allowed to get back to work,
the better. But at these last words, unexpected as a blow, he swung
violently round in his revolving chair to glare at the young man.

"Well, I'm damned!" he ejaculated.

Peter sincerely