The Board of Guardians nodded.
"That is, whatever we agree, goes?"
Again the Board of Guardians nodded.
"Well, I'd like to have a hundred right now," Dick announced.
"What for?" Mr. Crockett demanded.
"I don't mind telling you," was the lad's steady answer. "To go traveling."
"You'll go to bed at eight:thirty this evening," Mr. Crockett retorted. "And you don't get any hundred. The lady we spoke to you about will be here before six. She is to have, as we explained, daily and hourly charge of you. At six-thirty, as usual, you will dine, and she will dine with you and see you to bed. As we told you, she will have to serve the place of a mother to you--see that your ears are clean, your neck washed--"
"And that I get my Saturday night bath," Dick amplified meekly for him.
"Precisely."
"How much are you--am I--paying the lady for her services?" Dick questioned in the disconcerting, tangential way that was already habitual to him, as his school companions and teachers had learned to their cost.
Mr. Crockett for the first time cleared his throat for pause.
"I'm paying her, ain't I?" Dick prodded. "Out of the twenty million, you know."
"The spit of his father," said Mr. Slocum in an aside.
"Mrs. Summerstone, the lady as you elect to call her, receives one hundred and fifty a month, eighteen hundred a year in round sum," said Mr. Crockett.
"It's a waste of perfectly good money," Dick sighed. "And board and lodging thrown in!"
He stood up--not the born aristocrat of the generations, but the reared aristocrat of thirteen years in the Nob Hill palace. He stood up with such a manner that his Board of Guardians left their leather chairs to stand up with him. But he stood up as no Lord Fauntleroy ever stood up; for he was a mixer. He had knowledge that human life was many-faced and many-placed. Not for nothing had he been spelled down by Mona Sanguinetti. Not for nothing had he fought Tim Hagan to a standstill and, co-equal, ruled the schoolyard roost with him.
He was birthed of the wild gold-adventure of Forty-nine. He was a reared aristocrat and a grammar-school-trained democrat. He knew, in his precocious immature way, the differentiations between caste and mass; and, behind it all, he was possessed of a will of his own and of a quiet surety of self that was incomprehensible to the three elderly gentlemen who had been given charge of his and his destiny and who had pledged themselves to increase his twenty millions and make a man of him in their own composite image.