"D'you mean he's stopping the allowance?"

"Yes. At least he's not renewing it. He's offering me a salary if I'll
work. A jolly good salary, I grant. I can be just to him, though he
can't to me. But, if I'm going to draw the salary, I've got to learn the
business and, in fact, go into it and become a spinner. Then, at the end
of five years, if I shine and really get keen about it and help the
show, he'll take me into partnership. That's his offer; and first I told
him to go to the devil, and then I changed my mind and, after my aunt
had sounded Daniel and found that was his ultimatum, I climbed down."

"What are you to do? Surely he won't chain an open-air man like you to a
wretched desk all your time?"

"So I thought; but he didn't worry about that. I wanted to go abroad,
and combine business with pleasure, and buy the raw material in Russia
and India and Italy and so on. That might have been good enough; but in
his rather cold-blooded way, he pointed out that to buy raw material,
you wanted to know something about raw material. He asked me if I knew
hemp from flax, and of course I had to say I did not. So that put the
lid on that. I've got to begin where Daniel began ten years ago--at the
beginning--with this difference, that I get three hundred quid a year.
In fact there's such a mixture of fairness and unfairness in Daniel's
idea that you don't know where to have him."

"What shall you do about it?"

"I tell you I've agreed. I must live, obviously, and I'd always meant
to do something some day. But naturally my ideas were open air, and I
thought when I got things going and took a scheme to my father--for