"He's dead."

"Then his family----"

"I don't think he left any family," Mrs. Adams said. "Anyhow,
it belongs to your father. At least it belongs to him as much as
it does to any one else. He's got an absolutely perfect right to
do anything he wants to with it, and it would make us all
comfortable if he'd do what I want him to--and he KNOWS it would,
too!"

Alice shook her head pityingly. "Poor mama!" she said. "Of
course he knows it wouldn't do anything of the kind, or else he'd
have done it long ago."

"He would, you say?" her mother cried. "That only shows how
little you know him!"

"Poor mama!" Alice said again, soothingly. "If papa were like
what you say he is, he'd be--why, he'd be crazy!"

Mrs. Adams agreed with a vehemence near passion. "You're right
about him for once: that's just what he is! He sits up there in
his stubbornness and lets us slave here in the kitchen when if he
wanted to--if he'd so much as lift his little finger----"

"Oh, come, now!" Alice laughed. "You can't build even a glue
factory with just one little finger."

Mrs. Adams seemed about to reply that finding fault with a