Page:Keeping the Peace.pdf/103

 said. "I wouldn't know how to go about it. But it'll be three or four years before you know what you really want to do. Whatever that is, if it's decent and honest, you do it. Promise?"

Edward promised.

"If it's painting, I'll help. I'll have a ship of my own then, and out of my pay I'll manage to keep you somewhere where you can get good instruction and learn all about it. Paris, I guess. But you'd be pretty young to be paddling your own canoe, and I wouldn't want to take the responsibility unless you'd make me some solemn promises and keep 'em—not to drink or smoke until you were twenty-one—the red and white wine you'd get in the Latin Quarter wouldn't count—that's good for people. And—I don't know how much you know about life . . . Men and women and all that?"

Edward turned a slow red, thus indicating that like most American boys of thirteen he was pretty well posted.

" . . . And I'd want you to promise not to get mixed up with any woman, either . . . Eddie, every trouble I've run across in this world or heard tell about has had a woman at the bottom of it. It's always either what the world calls a bad woman, or else it's what the world calls a good woman . . . How's father?"