man?"

As this amazing proposition was advanced by his elderly friend, Mr.
Port's anger and astonishment were aroused together; and his rude
rejoinder to it was: "Have you gone crazy, Brown, or has Dorothy been
making a fool of you? Has she asked you to ask me to take her to the
Casino hop? She knows there is no use in talking to me about it any
longer."

"No, certainly not--at least--that is to say--well, no, not exactly,"
replied Mr. Brown, beginning his sentence with an asperity and
positiveness that somehow did not hold out to its end. "She did say to
me, I confess, how fond she was of dancing, and how she had refrained
from saying much about it to you"--Mr. Port here interpolated a
sceptical snort--"because she knew that taking her to the Casino would
only bore you. And I do think, Port, that keeping her here with us all
the time is grossly selfish; and if you don't want to take her to the
hop I hope you'll let her go with me. But what we'd better do, old man,
is to take her together--then we can talk to each other just as well,
at least nearly as well, as we can here, and we can have the comfort of
knowing that she is enjoying herself too. Come, Hutch; we're getting old
and rusty, you and I, but let us try at least to keep from degenerating
into a pair of selfish old brutes with no care for anybody's comfort but
our own."

Mr. Hutchinson Port might have replied with a fair amount of truth that
so far as he himself was concerned the degeneration that his friend
referred to as desirable to avoid already had taken place. But all of us
like most to be credited with the virtues of which we have least, and he
therefore accepted as his due Mr. Brown's tribute of implied praise.
And the upshot of the matter was that Dorothy, when she returned to the
veranda again, was unaffectedly surprised (and considering how carefully
she had planned her small campaign she did it very creditably) by
discovering that her uncle's edict against the Casino hops had been
withdrawn.

VII.

Even Dorothy was disposed to believe that unless some peculiarly
favorable combination of circumstances presented itself as a basis for
her intelligent manipulation her strong desire for a yacht voyage must
remain ungratified; for, now that his liver was decidedly the larger
part of him, Mr. Port had a fairly catlike dread of the sea. To be sure,
Dorothy's character was a resolute one, and her staying powers were
quite remarkable; but in the