hope. He was leading a life of elegant idleness, sleeping late, eating unlimitedly, wearing good clothes and doing no work whatever; and by contrast with his days as a telegraph boy, he was a son of poverty who had fallen heir to millions. Consequently, he was full of a restless vitality that remained bottled up in him like an effervescence. He made his Institute teacher take lessons from him so that she could understand “dummy talk”; for she refused to let him whisper to her, even in the privacy of his room—obeying Babbing’s orders. And when he was left to his solitary afternoons, he roamed around impatiently, unable to take any interest in the “baby books” that his affectionate Papa had bought for him. He had been carefully deprived of the newspapers, which he was supposed to be too immature to understand. “Gee!” he said to himself, “a fullah might ’s well be in a coop. It would n’t hurt ’em to let me go to a movey. Gee, this is fierce. If somethin’ don’t happen soon, I ’ll blow up an’ bust.”
