Читать книгу The Mystery Lady - Robert William Chambers - Страница 3

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That was the trouble with the boy when he came into his own money—a headstrong desire to prove himself a grown man—reaction, probably, from twenty years of apron-strings, from which the death of his widowed mother and the advent of his majority set him free.

Now he was through with advice. He was through with having anybody tell him anything. He was now ready to tell the world.... At twenty-one.

His sister could do nothing with him. He was sensitive, stubborn, cocksure of himself. He flared up at any hint of admonition, of authority, of pressure.

He was neither vicious nor weak; he was a healthy cub suddenly unleashed in the world’s very large back yard. It went to his head, and he raced all over the place, intoxicated by a freedom with which he did not know what to do.

There’s always some dog-catcher watching for crazy pups.

A Mr. Barney Welper made the boy’s acquaintance one evening in the Club at Palm Beach. At West Palm Beach there was a religious revival and prohibition rally, whither, it appeared, Mr. Welper was bound. That he could not induce the boy to go, saddened Mr. Welper.

So, as the boy did not take readily to the spiritual, Mr. Welper tried him with the material.

Like the Red Fisherman who has such a varied assortment of bait in his bait-box, Mr. Welper therefore changed the lure and put on a gang-hook garnished with cruder bait.

So several enormously wealthy friends of Mr. Welper’s sauntered onto the stage, taking their several and familiar cues in turn.

The first of these was a very pretty brunette woman of thirty—a Mrs. Helen Wyvern. She had been “misunderstood,” it appeared.

After half an hour on the beach with her the boy discovered that Mrs. Wyvern was the first woman who ever had “understood” him.

Still all a-quiver with wonder, pride, and gratitude, he met another friend of Mr. Welper’s—a Mr. Eugene Renton.

Mrs. Wyvern whispered to the boy that, like Mr. Welper and herself, Mr. Renton was making millions out of Orizava Oil.

The rest is redundant.