of 'steen different brands I could take without getting foolish, and I
could play poker and win once in awhile. I had a steam-yacht and a motor
of my own, and it was generally stripped to racing trim. And I wasn't
tangled up with any women; actress-worship had never appealed to me. My
tastes all went to the sporting side of life and left women to the fellows
with less nerve and more sentiment.

So I had lived for twenty-five years--just having the best time a fellow
with an unlimited resource can have, if he is healthy.

It was then, on my twenty-fifth birthday, that I walked into dad's private
library with a sonly smile, ready for the good wishes and the check that
I was in the habit of getting--I'd been unlucky, and Lord knows I needed
it!--and what does the dear man do?

Instead of one check, he handed me a sheaf of them, each stamped in divers
places by divers banks. I flipped the ends and looked them over a bit,
because I saw that was what he expected of me; but the truth is, checks
don't interest me much after they've been messed up with red and green
stamps. They're about as enticing as a last year's popular song.

Dad crossed his legs, matched his finger-tips together, and looked at me
over his glasses. Many a man knows that attitude and that look, and so
many a man has been as uncomfortable as I began to be, and has felt as
keen a sense of impending trouble. I began immediately searching my memory
for some especial brand of devilment that I'd been sampling, but there was
nothing doing. I had been losing some at poker lately, and I'd been away
to the bad out at Ingleside; still, I looked him innocently in the eye
and wondered what was coming.