"We must do what seems best for the moment, and let the future take
care of itself. Barry's only a boy. They are neither of them ready
for marriage--a few years of waiting won't hurt them."
It was in this strain that Gordon talked to Barry.
"It won't hurt you to wait."
"Wait for what?" Barry flamed; "until Leila wears her heart out? Until
you teach her that I'm not--fit? Until somebody else comes along and
steals her, while I'm gone?"
"Is that the opinion you have of her constancy?"
"No," Barry said, huskily, "she's as true as steel. But I can't see
the use of this, Gordon. If I marry Leila, she'll make a man of me."
"She hasn't changed you during these last months," Gordon stated,
inexorably, "and you mustn't run the risk of making her unhappy. It is
a mere business proposition that I am putting before you, Barry. You
must be able to support a wife before you marry one, and Washington
isn't the place for you to start. In a business like ours, a man must
be at his best. You are wasting your time here, and you've acquired
the habit of sociability, which is just a habit, but it grows and will
end by paralyzing your forces. A man who's always ready to be with the
crowd isn't the man that's ready for work, and he isn't the man who's
usually onto his job. I am putting this not from any moral or
spiritual ideal, but from the commercial. The man who wins out isn't
the one with his brain fuddled; he's the one with his brain clear.
Business to-day is too keen a game for any one to play who isn't
willing to be at it all the time."
Thus practical common sense met the boy at every turn. And he was
forced at last for pride's sake to consent to Gordon's plans for him.
But he had gone to Mary, raging. "Is he going to run our lives?"
"He is doing it for your good, Barry."
"Why can't I go South with Roger Poole?--if I must go away? He told me
of a man who stayed in the woods with him."
"That would simply be temporary, and it would delay matters. Gordon's
idea is that in this way you'll be established in business. If you
went South you'd be without any remunerative occupation."
"Doesn't Poole make a living down there?"
"He hasn't yet. He's to try story-writing."