Harvey J. O'Higgins

“ His mind was full of Howard Janes's plans for harnessing Smith's Falls, of electrifying the street railway, of lighting Coulton with electricity and turning the vacant Tyler lots of the northern suburb into factory sites. He was thinking of incorporations, franchises, capitalizations, stocks, bonds, mortgages, and loans. He had been talking them over with Janes for hours on the veranda, at the supper-table, on the street. There had been no music. As Wat was leaving he had spoken to Alicia hastily in the hall—asking her to marry him, in fact—and she had said, "Oh, Wat!" ”

“ He's always so busy he doesn't pay much attention to what goes on at home."
"I don't think I've ever seen any of your family," she said, "except your sisters." She was thinking of them as she used to see them in their school-days, in short dresses, giggling, and chewing candy in the street-cars.
"They're very young," Wat warned her, "and they've been spoiled. You mustn't mind if Millie— She's been allowed to do pretty much as she likes. Our life at home isn't like yours, you know. I think our house is too big. We seem to be—sort of separated in our rooms." ”

“ On a memorable Tuesday evening Wat had "stopped in" at the Janeses' on his way down-town with his friend Webb, to let Webb return to Miss Janes some music that he had borrowed. And, by a determining accident of fate, as they approached the lamplit veranda of the Janes cottage, Alicia Janes was sitting behind the vine-hung lattice, reading a magazine, while her mother played the piano.
Observe: There was no veranda on the Tyler "residence"; no one ever sat outdoors there; and no one ever played anything but dance-music on the Tyler piano. ”

“ On the Janes veranda he was nothing of the sort. As the son of the owner of the Coulton street-car line and the Tyler real estate, he was a young man of social importance in a home where the mother earned a living by teaching music and the daughter had only the prospect of doing the same. He was a man of the practical world, whose opinions were authoritative. ”

“ Behind his inscrutable silence he studied and watched the men with whom he had to work, moving like a quiet engineer among the machinery which he had started, and the uproar of it. And the moment he decided that a man was wrong he took him out and dropped him clean, without feeling, without any friendly entanglement to deter him, silently. ”

“ Tyler privately in her home on Sunday. They had a long and solemn noon dinner that was part of the ritual of the day, and after dinner she always sat with her husband and her daughters in the sitting-room up-stairs, indulging her domestic soul in the peace of a family reunion that seemed only possible to the Tylers on Sunday afternoon when they were gorged like a household of pythons. Wat retired to his bedroom. Every twenty minutes he wandered down-stairs, passed the door of the sitting-room slowly, and returned up the back stairs by stealth. ”

“ Millie demanded. "Why has he been hiding it, and sneaking off to see her and never saying a word about it, if he isn't ashamed of it and afraid to tell us? They've roped him in. That's what I think. Lizzie Janes is a regular old maid now. If she isn't engaged to Wat, she intends to be. No one else would ever marry her. I bet they've been working Wat for all they're worth. They're as poor—"
Her father continued incredulous.
"Well," she cried, "Jack Webb says Wat's been going to church with her twice a Sunday." ”

“ Janes was then a tall, gaunt, feverish-eyed, dark enthusiast, of an extraordinary mental and physical restlessness a man who should have been a visionary, but had become an electrical engineer. He had been working on the project to develop electrical power at Niagara Falls, and in ten minutes he was describing to Wat the whole theory and progress of the work, past, present, and future. "In ten years," he said, "Niagara power will be shot all through this district for a hundred miles around, and here's Coulton asleep, with one of the best power projects in Canada right under its nose. ”

“ I've had enough for one Sunday."
As for Alicia Janes, it was late at night when she made her report to her mother in a subdued tremble of excitement. She had overheard something of Wat's scuffle with Millie on the stairway, but she did not speak of it except to say: "I'm afraid the girls are awful. The youngest, Ollie, is overdressed and silly—with the manners of a spoiled child of ten. It's her mother's fault. She's one of those helpless big women. Wat must have got his qualities from his father." ”

“ Tyler may have felt that he did not appreciate the merit of these facts. He made a judicial noise in his throat and said nothing.
"She's older than any of us—than Wat, too."
"Well," he said, reaching for his newspaper, "I suppose Wat 'll do what he likes. He's not likely to do anything remarkable one way or the other."
"He's not going to marry Lizzie Janes," Millie declared. "Not if I can help it."
"Millie," her mother scolded, "you've no right interfering in Wat's affairs. He's older than you are—"
"It isn't only Wat's affair," she cried. "She isn't only going to marry Wat. ”

“ I don't feel called on to help him. It means more to the girls than it does to us, in any case. They'll have to put up with her for the rest of her life."
"I guess not!" Millie said, confidently.
"Now, Millie!" her mother threatened. "If you—"
"If you want Lizzie Janes and her mother in this family," Millie said, "I don't. I guess it won't be hard to let Wat and them know it, either. And if you won't," she ended, defiantly, as she turned away, "I will!"
She went out and Ollie followed. Mrs. Tyler dropped back in her chair, gazing speechlessly at her husband. ”

“ You can just take her away again. I don't want her, and they don't want her." She had begun to raise her voice, with the evident intention of letting any one hear who would. "If she thinks she can—"
"That's enough!" ”

“ The Mechanics' Bank of Canada passed to him later, but by that time he was running, at "Tylertown," an automobile factory, a stone-crusher, a carborundum works, and the plant of Coulton's famous Eleco Breakfast Food, cooked by electricity, and the success of the whole city of Coulton was so involved with his fortunes that he simply could not be allowed to fail. ”

“ Finally, when his mother heard him creaking down the stairs for the fourth time, she called out: "Wat! What is the matter with you? If you're restless, why don't you go for a walk?"
He answered, hastily, "I'm going," and continued down to the lower hall. Millie waited to hear the front door shut behind him. She had just remembered what he said at breakfast about Jack Webb taking him to see the Janes girl. She went at once to the library to telephone.
And she came flying back with the news that while they had been away Wat had been spending almost every evening with Lizzie Janes ”

“ They heard him pacing the floor overhead. Millie listened to him thoughtfully. The younger sister, Ollie, was trying to write letters on note-paper of robin's-egg blue, and she blamed him for all the difficulties of composition ”