all their lives long. He had been spoiled originally by being ten years
younger than the next youngest in the family; and then, when the children
had been shipped on to Aunt Mary’s tender mercies, Jack had won her heart
immediately because she accidentally discovered that he had never been
baptized, and so felt fully justified in re-naming him after her own
father and having the name branded into him for keeps by her own religious
apparatus. It followed naturally that John Watkins, Jr., Denham, for so
her father’s daughter had insisted that her youngest nephew should be
called, was the favorite nephew of his aunt.

And it was lucky for him that he was the favorite, for Aunt Mary, who was
highly spiced at fifty, became peppery at sixty, and almost biting at
seventy. And yet for Jack she would sign checks almost without a murmur.
Mr. Stebbins was much more censorious and impatient with the young man
than she ever was; and to all the rest of the world Mr. Stebbins was an
urbane and agreeable gentleman, whereas to all the rest of the world Aunt
Mary was a problem or a terror. But Mr. Stebbins needed to be a man of
tact and management, for he was the real manager of that fortune of which
"Mary, only surviving child of John Watkins, merchant and ship owner," was
the legal possessor; and so tactful was Mr. Stebbins that he and his
powerful client had never yet clashed, and they had been in close business
relations for almost as many years as Lucinda had been established on the
hearthstone of the Watkins home. Perhaps one reason why Mr. Stebbins
endured so well was that he had a real talent for compromising, and that
he had skillfully transformed Aunt Mary’s inherited taste for driving a
bargain into an acquired pleasure in what is really a polite form of the
same action.

So, when it came to the matter of Jack’s difficulties, Mr. Stebbins could
always find a half-way measure that saved the situation; and when he