ELLIE was in the garden, and interrupted his progress toward a belated dinner. “Father wants to see you,” she called; “at the Club, of course.” He wondered absently, approaching the Club, what his father wanted. The rooms occupied the second story of the edifice that housed the administration of the county; the main corridor was choked by a crowd that moved noisily toward an auditorium in the rear, but the Club was silent, save for the click of invisible billiard balls.
His father was asleep in the reading room, a newspaper spread upon his knees, and one thin hand twisted in his beard. Through an open window drifted the strains of a band on the Courthouse lawn. The older man woke, clearing his throat sharply. “Well, Anthony,” he nodded. Anthony found a chair.
His father leaned forward, regarding him with a keen, kindly gaze. “I'm told the garage has gone up,” he commenced.
“Sam took his car away; it was Alfred's infernal tinkering; he can't leave a machine alone.”
“Did you close affairs satisfactorily, stop solvent?”
“There's a little debt of about six dollars.”
The other sought his wallet, and, removing a rubber band, counted six dollars into Anthony's hand. “Meet that in the morning.” He leaned hack, tapping the wallet with deliberate fingers. “I suppose you have no plan for the immediate future,” he observed.
“I have one for you, though, as 'right now' as this week.”
Anthony listened respectfully, his thoughts still dwelling upon the beauty of the dusk without, of life. “You have tried a number of things in the past few years without success. I have started you in a small way again and again, only to observe the familiar course of a failure inevitable from your shiftless habits. You are not a bad boy, but you have no ability to concentrate, like a stream spread all over the meadow--you have no course. You're a loiterer.”
“Yes, sir,” said Anthony, from the midst of his abstraction.
“You are too old for that now, either it must stop at once, or you will become definitely worthless. I am going to make a determined effort--I am going to send you to California, your brother-in-law writes that he can give you something.”
The term California sounded in Anthony's brain like the unexpected clash of an immense hell. It banished his pleasant revery in disordered shreds, filling him with sudden dismay.