Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/125

 the people. They ain't going to git the good of your generosity. You'll only be a putting money into the pockets of the rich manufacturers. That's plain enough to see."

"If the manufacturers choose to pocket what doesn't belong to them, that isn't my . It's hard times, and it's going to be harder, and I don't mean to get rich on other people's misfortunes."

This time Old Lady Pratt sat still and thought. Her silence was particularly impressive, as she had not even her week-day knitting to bridge it over. At last she said, reflectively: "I'm afraid you 'reall wrong, William. 'T ain't the way folks do business—though I ain't sure that your father wouldn't have acted just so. And I declare for 't," with a sudden impulsiveness very unusual in her. "Ef I was you, I believe I'd ruther be wrong than right!"

And then to her son's unbounded surprise the self-contained old lady came over and gave him a hearty kiss—a thing which had not happened, except on state occasions, since he was a small boy.

William himself had no misgivings. He was accustomed to thinking things out for himself, and he had very little regard for "consequences," that bugbear of many a thinker. It used to seem to him as though certain of the practical men of his acquaintance were always trying to hit the bull's-eye by aiming somewhere else. They fired