"Thanks, awfully, pater. Being nothing more than a fool I suppose it is up to me to get married. Very well, then, I will. Give me your hand, dad; it's a bargain."
Whitney Barnes tossed away his cigarette and grasped his father's hand in both of his. He had become intensely serious. There was a depth of affection in that handclasp that neither father nor son permitted to show above the surface. Yet both felt it keenly within. Picking up his hat and stick, the tall, slim, graceful young man said:
"You have no further commands on the subject, dad? Do you want to pick the girl, or will you leave it to the taste and sometimes good judgment of a fool?"
"Haven't you any one in mind, son?" asked Joshua Barnes, anxiously.
"Absolutely not one, pater. You see, the trouble is that I can't ever seem to get real chummy with a girl but what her mother has to come and camp on my trail and scare me into fits. You haven't the least idea what a catch your son is, Joshua Barnes. Why, a mother-in-law looks to me like something in petticoats that comes creeping up with a catlike tread, carrying in one hand a net and in the other a bale-hook. I can't sit out two dances with a debutante before this nightmare is looking over my shoulder, grinning like a gargoyle and counting up the number of millions you are going to leave me."
"Oh, bosh!" ejaculated Joshua Barnes. "It's all in your fool imagination. Grow up and be a man, Whitney. You have given me your word and I expect you to make good. And by the way, son, there is my old friend Charley Calker's girl, just out of college. I hear she's a stunner."
"Mary Calker is a stunner, dad, and then a trifle. But I regret to say that she is too fresh from the cloistered halls of learning. You see I have been out of college three years and have managed to forget such a jolly lot that I really couldn't talk to her. She'd want me to make love in Latin and correspond in Greek. Worse than that, she understands Browning. No, poor Mary will have to marry a prescription clerk, or a florist or something else out of the classics. But, don't lose heart, pater, I may be engaged before night. By-by."
It was a vastly more solemn Whitney Barnes who strolled out of the office of the mustard magnate and dragged his feet through the anteroom where sat Marietta Featherington and Teddie O'Toole. The comely Miss Featherington could scarcely believe what she saw from under her jutting puffs.