age. You got a girl pretty much in the house, but a boy'll
follow his nature. _I_ don't know what to do with him!"

Mrs. Adams brightened a little. "He'll come out all right," she
said. "I'm sure he will. I'm sure he'd never be anything really
bad: and he'll come around all right about the glue-works, too;
you'll see. Of course every young man wants money--it doesn't
prove he's doing anything wrong just because he asks you for it."

"No. All it proves to me is that he hasn't got good sense asking
me for three hundred and fifty dollars, when he knows as well as
you do the position I'm in! If I wanted to, I couldn't hardly
let him have three hundred and fifty cents, let alone dollars!"

"I'm afraid you'll have to let ME have that much--and maybe a
little more," she ventured, timidly; and she told him of her
plans for the morrow. He objected vehemently.

"Oh, but Alice has probably asked him by this time," Mrs. Adams
said. "It really must be done, Virgil: you don't want him to
think she's ashamed of us, do you?"

"Well, go ahead, but just let me stay away," he begged. "Of
course I expect to undergo a kind of talk with him, when he gets
ready to say something to us about Alice, but I do hate to have
to sit through a fashionable dinner."

"Why, it isn't going to bother you," she said; "just one young
man as a guest."